Subject-verb agreement in complex business sentences

Summary

This downloadable PDF lesson plan for English teachers helps B1 students master subject-verb agreement in business contexts. A great ESL resource for improving professional communication skills, this class material is designed for intermediate learners.

This comprehensive lesson helps students navigate complex subject-verb agreement rules in professional English. The material includes a warm-up discussion, a business vocabulary matching task, and a listening exercise based on a manager's update. Students then review key grammar rules before applying them in targeted practice exercises, a reading gap-fill about a corporate merger, and a final writing task where they compose a professional email, ensuring practical application of the concepts learned.

Activities

• Students begin with a warm-up where they analyze sentence correctness, followed by a matching exercise to learn key business terms like "subsidiary" and "consensus" relevant to the lesson.
• The lesson features a listening gap-fill where students hear a manager giving a strategic update, testing their contextual understanding. This is followed by a clear breakdown of four essential subject-verb agreement rules.
• Learners solidify their understanding with multiple-choice grammar practice, a reading gap-fill about a corporate merger, and a final writing task where they apply the new rules in a professional email.

Subject-verb agreement in complex business sentences B1

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Vocabulary focus

This lesson focuses on key business vocabulary essential for understanding corporate communications. Students will learn and practice using terms such as subsidiary, fluctuating, agile, compiled, crucial, and consensus, which are integrated into the listening and reading activities to provide context.

Grammar focus

The core grammar point is subject-verb agreement in complex sentences. The lesson covers rules for ignoring interrupting phrases (e.g., "along with," "as well as"), using collective nouns (e.g., "team," "staff"), applying the proximity rule with "neither/nor," and using indefinite pronouns and quantifiers ("each," "a number of").

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