Amazon.com description: Product Description: Focus on Vocabulary: Mastering the Academic Word List, by Diane Schmitt and Norbert Schmitt, is a research-based vocabulary textbook that gives high-intermediate to advanced students the advantage they need to succeed in academic environments. Through excerpts from college texts and well-crafted exercises, English learners study the Academic Word List -- the most frequently used words in academic texts. To help students reach a fuller understanding of the new vocabulary, each chapter provides a series of exercises on word meaning and word families. In addition, collocations exercises develop students' ability to form natural partnerships between the target vocabulary and other words. Features *Seven units focus on a variety of subject areas, such as social change, consumer behavior, natural resources, and music. *Each chapter carefully recycles the target vocabulary four times in reading passages and vocabulary-building exercises. *The collocation exercises -- based on the 179-million-word New Longman Corpus -- reflect how academic words are actually used in real contexts. *Strategy Practice chapters offer tips for dictionary usage, information about word roots and affixes, and methods for expanding students' word knowledge. *An Expansion section at the end of each chapter provides additional reading, discussion, and writing activities that broaden students' understanding of vocabulary.