by Karen Adams of BBC.com.



Learning Objective: At the end of the session, the students are expected to be able to identify the correct way of finding the subject and object in an S-V-O pattern of sentence by asking the correct questions.


This is a really interesting question, and it’s a question about questions.

Let’s take a sentence as an example: “Callum ate a lot of chocolate”.



In this sentence,

“Callum” is the subject,

ate is the verb

and

“a lot of chocolate” is the object.

Now, if we want to make questions to find this information, we need to make different kinds of questions.


In our example “Callum ate a lot of chocolate”,

if we want to make a question where the answer is “Callum”,

the question would be

“Who ate a lot of chocolate?”

“Callum ate a lot of chocolate.”

This question is looking for the subject of the sentence, Callum.







However, if we want to make a question where the answer is “a lot of chocolate.”

The question would be

“What did Callum eat?”

“What did Callum eat?”

“A lot of chocolate.”

In the object questions we require the auxiliary verb “do/does/did”,

but in the subject questions we don’t need the auxiliary.

For example:

“Good students join English Channel sessions regularly .”

If we want to get information about the subject – “Who join English Channel sessions regularly?”


If we want to get information about the object “What do good students do?”


Exercise

Instructions: Mark the SUBJECT, VERB and OBJECT using the letters S, V, O.

1. Mothers love their children.

2. Bees make honey.

3. We are studying Latin.

4. The boy is eating some sweets.

5. Cats chase birds.