TOEFL Tip #43: Improve Your Subject-Verb Agreement When Speaking

by Strictly English TOEFL Tutors on June 22, 2009

Many people—-even the most advanced non-native English speakers—-drop the “S” at the ends of words. And, in all honesty, it is very hard to train yourself to stop doing it. So, here is one trick that will help you a lot: read documents that have every “S” highlighted.  This highlighting will draw your attention to each “S” as you read the document aloud. Repeating this every day for one month should completely eliminate the dropped “S”.  Here is an example:

Highlighted "S"s

Now you can either take the time to highlight the “S”s yourself or you can have your computer do it.  I use my computer, and here’s how:

1. Import any text into a word processor of your choice. I usually take my articles  from www.NYTimes.com

2. Initiate a FIND AND REPLACE.

3. In the FIND box, put in “s” [space] (if you don’t put a SPACE after the “S”, then you’ll highlight “S”s in the middle of words, which you don’t want.)

4. In the REPLACE box, put in “s” [space]

5. With your cursor still in the REPLCE box, Select HIGHLIGHT in the FORMAT pop-up menu. (The FORMAT pop-up menu might be hard to find depending on the word processor you use.)

6. Select REPLACE ALL

7. Repeat steps 2-7 but this time, put “s.” [space] into both the FIND and REPLCE boxes (notice the PERIOD after the “s”)

8. Repeat steps 2-7 but this time, put “s,” [space] into both the FIND and REPLCE boxes (notice the COMMA after the “s”)

Categories: Speaking
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