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This sentence is from IELTS-teacher Youtube video (time 19:01):

A very important aspect of teaching is the ability of the teacher to shape their teaching style to the needs of their students.

My question is why one teacher shapes "their teaching style to the needs of their students".

If it should be teachers, this YouTube teacher is unreliable. We expect from a teacher to be perfect at this pretty simple English level. And if the sentence is OK, please explain to me why.

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The pronoun they is sometimes used to refer to one person when the author doesn't want to specify their gender as either masculine or feminine. See Singular they at Wikipedia.

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  • Please don't answer questions that have already been dealt with.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Dec 18, 2014 at 11:17
  • Ok, so we should always search for duplicates before answering?
    – bdsl
    Commented Dec 18, 2014 at 11:37
  • Not necessarily a tedious trawl through the archives. But here, a search for the obvious 'data + plural' rapidly turns up the original. Assume that a lot of questions have already been asked.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Dec 18, 2014 at 11:50

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