Teaching vocabulary

The purpose of this work is to present a systematic framework for vocabulary development by combining three approaches to vocabulary instruction and learning: incidental learning, explicit instruction, and independent strategy development. The research tests the retention of two types of words, words that have to be inferred and words glossed in a text. The results show that retention of the inferred words was much higher than that of the glossed words. This study confirmed theories that the retention of inferred words is higher than the retention of words where the meaning is given, and that incidental vocabulary learning is not particularly efficient. The conclusion of the study is that even an interesting article cannot help much in the incidental learning of words.