Focus on: View
Today, I’m going to write about the word view. It’s an interesting word, and I like the way it sounds! It rhymes with other words that I like – new, blue, grew….
What about you? Do you like the word view? Which other words does it rhyme with?
Another thing I like about it is that it tends to collocate (appear together) with positive words, like wonderful, beautiful, or even better – with words like breathtaking, spectacular, stunning, impressive, panoramic ….
What about you? Which words do you like to read and say views with?
And what about the meaning of view – or should I say, meanings?
If we look at the English Vocabulary Profile, then we see that students appear to know different meanings at different levels of the CEFR.
At A2, students will know the meaning of ‘things you can see from a place’.
e.g. The views across the lake are amazing.
What’s your favourite view? How often do you get the chance to see it?
At B1, we add the meaning of ‘opinion’
e.g. In my view, it would be better to go by train.
What’s the best way to travel in your view?
Then, at a higher level (C2, which I found a bit surprising), we get view as a verb, with two meanings: ‘to watch’ and ‘to hold an opinion about something.’
e.g The number of people viewing films on-demand at home is soaring.
Sharks are viewed by many people as the most dangerous animals in the sea.
How do you view films and series these days?
Do you view sharks as being particularly dangerous?
View is also a very generative word. We can use it in expressions, and add prefixes and suffixes to it.
I’ve created a wordlist for view on the Cambridge Dictionary website.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/plus/wordlist/25576029_view
You could share this with students (B2-C1 would be my suggestion). They can study the different meanings.
And then, they can test themselves with a quiz.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/plus/wordlist/25576029_view/quiz
I’ve prepared some Use of English tasks to practise the word ‘view’. Again, B2 -C1 recommended (especially for the second sentence transformation!)
Click on the link to download:
Finally, so that students will hopefully remember the different meanings of view and the words that can be built from it, you can ask them to create a record.
A few years back, I adapted this record sheet from an idea in one of the Cambridge Assessment seminars.
I give it to my B2 and C1 students to keep records of words like view.
I hope you found this post interesting. I’ll be sharing more ideas – for lower levels – on this theme in my next post – so watch this space!
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