Product Summery
Aims of this book
The aim of this book is to help you, as an advanced learner of English, to extend and improve your vocabulary by:
- increasing the number of words that you know.
- helping you to use words in a more natural, more accurate way.
- improving your knowledge and active use of collocation.
- presenting additional meanings or metaphorical uses of words you may already know.
Using the book
Do the first eight units, i-viii, before you start on any other units.
Then do not just work through the book from the first to the last page - choose the units you need most or that appeal to you most and do them first.
When you are working on any of Units 1 to 100:
- read the left-hand page.
- attempt the exercises on the right-hand page.
- check your answers in the key.
When checking your answers in the key, you will find that it sometimes contains extra useful information about the area of language you are working on. So, read it carefully and make notes of any interesting language that you learn from it.
Revising
- You will learn most effectively if you revise the units you study:
- a week after you first worked on the unit
- again after a month.
Dictionaries
You will also be able to gain much more from the language presented in this book if follow up words that especially interest you in a good learner's dictionary (see Unit iii). By doing this, you can extend your vocabulary still further.
You may find, for example:
- other useful collocations.
- other meanings for the words you look up.
- other words based on the same root.
Personalising words
Research studies show that we remember new words much more easily if we think about them in relation to our own experience and use them in a context that is meaningful to us as individuals. So, as well as doing the exercises here, write any new words or phrases that you particularly wish to learn in a context that has some personal meaning for you. You could, for example, use the language you wish to learn in a sentence about an experience you have had personally, or about a story you have read in a newspaper or magazine, or about a film or TV programme you have watched.
This helps in two ways by:
- revising language you have already worked on.
- making language personally more meaningful and, thus, more memorable.
Grouping words
Research shows that it is very useful to organise a set of vocabulary items being studied into groups. It does not matter how you group those words or whether your groupings would make sense to anyone else or not. It is thinking about the words enough to create groups that improves how we learn those words.• As another revision technique, try organising the words you have worked on in a unit into three or four (or more) groups in any way that you find appropriate
Going beyond this book
Although this book deals with many useful words and expressions for advanced learners, it is clearly impossible to cover all the words that you may come across in English. The best way to increase your vocabulary further is to read and listen to as much English as you can and there are a lot of tips in the book suggesting ways in which you can do this.
Remember you can also usefully expand your vocabulary by:
- reading novels, newspapers or magazines
- exploring websites
- reading things in English that relate to your job or academic interests
- watching films or videos
- watching cable TV
- listening to the radio
- listening to songs
- listening to audio books.
So, good luck with your advanced study of English vocabulary. We hope that learn a lot from using this book and that you will enjoy working with it.you will