About this activity
Twelve sentences with an embedded relative clause: The girl who won the race is my friend. The book that I read was great. The man who fixed my car is nice. The dog that barks lives next door. The song that's playing is my favorite. The boy who sits by me moved away. Embedding a clause inside a subject is the syntactic step where many students stall in both speech and writing.
How to use it in a session
Build them from two sentences. The girl is my friend plus the girl won the race becomes the girl who won the race is my friend, and doing the combining is how the structure becomes visible. Point out that the main verb comes after the clause — is my friend — since students who lose track of that produce sentences with no main verb at all. Twelve minutes covers the set.
What to listen for
Listen for the main clause surviving. The girl who won the race is a common incomplete production: the student builds the embedded clause and forgets to finish the sentence. Watch who against that — who for people and that for things is the convention, and students who have never had it stated use one for everything.
Carrying it home
Relative clauses are frequent in ordinary speech. Combining two facts about the same person into one sentence — the woman who lives next door is a nurse — is a model that costs nothing to supply.
Questions
- What grades is this for?
- Fourth through seventh, where complex sentences are expected in writing.
- Is it free?
- Yes, all twelve sentences play with no account.
- My student starts the sentence and never finishes it. Why?
- Because the embedded clause takes up the working memory the main verb needed. Building from two separate sentences usually fixes it, since the student can see what the main clause was supposed to be.