A variety of communicative activities follows in order to allow the student ample opportunity to work with and acquire the new vocabulary.

I would definitely say "follow" in that sentence. Or replace "variety" with "list", and use "follows".

I think the Cuban is a little heavier since it's pork and the jambalay is chicken and sausage. Neither really makes me droopy though.

Oh, see, carbs make me snooze. Pork makes me happy!

I had a surprisingly good pork sandwich in the Charlotte airport the other day.

Or 'Various communicative activities follow in order'?

Nutty! I request that your praise me effusively for my diligence! In email is fine.

People, I have 10 emails from flea in my inbox. None of which I have read yet. She is very dilligent and enterprising! (I am not.)

A variety of communicative activities follows in order to allow the student ample opportunity to work with and acquire the new vocabulary.

I think "a variety of" is a construction that must work better in French than in English, because it's just sounding wrong to me as I read the sentence aloud. Like those wrongheaded people who say "a myriad of".

I guess I would replace variety with number, and then allow the plural verb.

Like those wrongheaded people who say "a myriad of".

Just because most of them are dead it doesn't mean you should be mean to them! I'm pretty sure that the preceding sentence parses--it might take more than one try, is all.

Throughout most of its history in English myriad was used as a noun, as in a myriad of men. In the 19th century it began to be used in poetry as an adjective, as in myriad men. Both usages in English are acceptable, as in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “Myriad myriads of lives.” This poetic, adjectival use became so well entrenched generally that many people came to consider it as the only correct use. In fact, both uses in English are parallel with those of the original ancient Greek. The Greek word mūrias, from which myriad derives, could be used as either a noun or an adjective, but the noun mūrias was used in general prose and in mathematics while the adjective mūrias was used only in poetry.

Go read those 10 emails! They are interesting!

One might even say a myriad of interesting emails awaits you!

ETA: Or is it await? Hah!

I wouldn't replace "variety" with "number", because for (what I assume is) the target audience, having different kinds of exercises is very different from having 15 only slightly different vocabulary matching drills, and it's a Very Big Deal in choosing (and therefore selling) materials.

However, I would switch the sentence around: Each (reading/text/chapter/whatev) is accompanied by a variety of activities to allow students to work with the new vocabulary.

Or is it await?

NoooooooooooooO!

That's it. I have to get back to my myriad myriads of emails.