Product Summery
Introduction
To the student
This book has been written to help you learn new vocabulary. You already know a large number of English words, but to express yourself more fully and in a more sophisticated way at the upper-intermediate level, you will ideally need about 4,000 words, so increasing your vocabulary is very important for your general progress in English. In this book, there are over 2,500 new words and phrases for you to learn. You will find them on the left-hand page of each unit. Every new word or phrase is used in a sentence, or in a conversation, or is in a table, or has a picture with it, or has some explanation of what it means. On the right-hand page there are exercises and other activities to help you practise using the words and to help you to remember them. The book has been written so that you can use it yourself, without a teacher. You can do the units in any order you like, but we believe it is a good idea if you do Units 1 to 4 first, as they will help you to work with the rest of the book in the best possible way.
The Answer key at the end of the book is for you to check your answers to the exercises after you do them. The Answer key sometimes has more than one answer. This is because often there is not just one correct way of saying something. Where you are asked to talk about yourself, in the Over to you exercises, we do not generally provide answers, since this is your opportunity to work completely independently and in a very personal way, so everyone’s answers will be very different.
The Index at the end of the book has all the important words and phrases from the left-hand pages. The Index also tells you how to pronounce words. There is a table of phonemic symbols to help you understand the pronunciation on page 258.
You should also have a dictionary with you when you use the book. You can use a paper dictionary or an electronic one, or you can go to Cambridge Dictionaries Online at http://dictionary.cambridge.org. Access to a dictionary is useful because sometimes you may want to check the meaning of something, or find a word in your own language to help you remember the English word. Sometimes, you will also need a dictionary for the exercises; we tell you when this is so.
To learn a lot of vocabulary, you have to do two things:
1 Study each unit of the book carefully and do all the exercises. Check your answers in the Answer key. Repeat the units after a month, and then again after three months, and see how much you have learnt and how much you have forgotten.
2 Develop ways of your own to study and learn new words and phrases which are not in this book. For example, every time you see or hear an interesting phrase, write it in a notebook, and write who said it or wrote it, and in what situation, as well as what it means. Making notes of the situations words are used in will help you to remember them and to use them at the right moment.
We hope you like this book. When you have finished it, you can go to the next book in the series,English Vocabulary in Use Advanced. Along with this book, you can also use the more specialised titles: English Idioms in Use, English Phrasal Verbs in Use and English Collocations in Use, all of which are available at intermediate and advanced levels.
To the teacher
This book can be used in class or as a self-study book. It is intended to take learners from a lower-intermediate level of vocabulary to an upper-intermediate level. The vocabulary has been chosen for its usefulness in everyday situations, and we consulted the Cambridge International Corpus (now known as the Cambridge English Corpus), a written and spoken corpus of present-day English, including a huge learner corpus, to help us decide on the words and phrases to be included for students at B2 (CEFR) level. The new vocabulary (on average 25–30 items per unit) is presented with illustrations and explanations on the left-hand page, and there are exercises and activities on the right-hand page. There is an Answer key and an Index with pronunciation for the target vocabulary. The Answer key at the end of the book is for students to check their answers to the exercises after they do them.
The book focuses not just on single words, but on useful phrases and collocations, and the vocabulary is illustrated in natural contexts. The book is organised around everyday topics, but also has units devoted to basic concepts such as time, number and movement, linking words,word formation, multi-word expressions, pronunciation and varieties and style, as well as a set of initial units concerned with ways of learning vocabulary. Typical errors are indicated where appropriate, based on information from the Cambridge Learner Corpus, and the most typical meanings and uses are focused on for each item. The units in the book can be used in any order you like, but we would advise doing the initial units (Units 1 to 4) first, as these lay the foundations for the rest of the book.
The right-hand pages offer a variety of different types of activities, with some traditional ones such as gap-filling, but also more open-ended ones and personalised activities which enable learners to talk about their own lives. Although the activities and exercises are designed for self-study, they can easily be adapted for pairwork, groupwork or whole-class activities in the usual way. The Answer key sometimes gives alternative answers to the exercises. This is because often there is not just one correct way of saying something. Where students are asked to talk about themselves, in the Over to you exercises, we do not generally provide answers, since these exercises give learners the opportunity to work completely independently and in a very personal way, so everyone’s answers will be very different.
When the learners have worked through a group of units, it is a good idea to repeat some of the work (for example, the exercises) and to expand on the meaning and use of key words and phrases by extra discussion in class, and find other examples of the key items in other texts and situations. This can be done at intervals of one to three months after first working on a unit. This is important, since it is usually the case that learners need five to seven exposures to a word or phrase before they can really begin to know it, and no single book can do enough to ensure that words are always learnt first time.
When your students have finished all the units in this book, they will be ready to move on to the higher-level books in this series: English Vocabulary in Use Advanced, and the advanced levels of English Idioms in Use, English Phrasal Verbs in Use and English Collocations in Use, by the same authors as this book.