Word of the Week

wowWith its 120th word, Word of the Week has now come to an end. We hope you enjoyed this free feature and that it has given you an insight into the thinking and research behind the English Vocabulary Profile.

All 120 are still available to read in our archive, below. Each Word of the Week in the archive is followed by a link to the full entry for that word on the English Vocabulary Profile. To view the entries, you will need to subscribe to the EVP: to subscribe for free click here.

Word of the week: give

Last week’s Word of the Week featured the verb take and now it’s the turn of another very frequent verb in English, give. The entry below spans the first four CEFR levels and the phrases give way and give rise to sth will be added at the C levels. Learners meet the basic meaning of the verb PROVIDE at A1 level, which is likely to be commonly used in the language classroom, as in Can you give me your homework? Some of the A2 meanings may already be known at A1 but the evidence is not there at the moment – as the entry shows, three of these meanings actually have B1 Learner examples rather than examples at A2. We are currently building the Cambridge English Profile Corpus, a new corpus of learner English, to encompass non-exam writing and spoken data, which will inform subsequent iterations of the English Vocabulary Profile. If you and your students are able to take part in our data collection project, you will gain free access to the EVP resource. The English Profile website has more details – follow this link to the page on Data Collection.
 
To view the full entry for give on the English Vocabulary Profile, please click here.

Word of the week: from

The preposition from has quite a long entry in the English Vocabulary Profile. Four distinct meanings appear to be known at A1 level, and learners continue to broaden their knowledge of the word up to B2, as this entry shows. One additional phrase will be included at C1: from then/that day on, as in They were good friends from that day on. Clearly, learners would be able to understand this sentence at an earlier stage of their learning, but the fact that the phrase with from is rooted in past time makes it more complex to master and use effectively. This illustrates an important feature of vocabulary development at the C levels, where progress is as much about fine-tuning and extending knowledge and use of existing words as acquiring a wider repertoire of new words. The English Vocabulary Profile up to C2 level is likely to contain no more than 7000 headwords in total, of which around 4700 will have already been encountered up to B2 level. However, the C levels will include a large number of additional meanings, phrases, phrasal verbs and idioms.
 
To view the full entry for from on the English Vocabulary Profile, please click here.

Word of the week: eye

The noun eye is known from A1 level in the sense of BODY PART, with further phrases and idioms featuring at higher CEFR levels. Learners appear to know two idioms with eye at B2 level, keep your/an eye on sb/sth and can’t keep/take your eyes off sb/sth. Given that there are fewer than ten idioms included in the English Vocabulary Profile up to B2 level, this is significant. As the earlier Word of the Week entry for foot indicated (see archived entries), idioms connected with parts of the body are commonly taught as a set and may be easier to internalise, as they often echo idioms in the first language: in Italian, tenere d’occhio means keep an eye on and in Spanish, someone who couldn’t take his eyes off a certain person se le fueron los ojos tras la chica! What about your own language? We would love to hear from you via the Feedback button if you have similar examples of ‘shared’ idioms. The English Vocabulary Profile now includes an Advanced Search for idioms, available in the current Preview Version for the letters DJK, where you will find more idioms using the verb keep.
 
To view the full entry for eye on the English Vocabulary Profile, please click here.

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