This chapter starts by exploring basic questions related to the learning of second language vocabulary such as What is a word? and What does it mean to know a word? It discusses form–meaning mapping as well as a word’s grammatical features and its collocations. The chapter focuses on different types of vocabulary knowledge including receptive knowledge, productive knowledge, breath and depth of knowledge, and knowledge related to multi-word units. The chapter refers to corpora as a way to understand how language functions in the real world. It also discusses different ways of learning new words, that is, incidental and intentional learning. The chapter moves onto issues related to the teaching of vocabulary, starting with explicit instruction involving memorization, and then moving on to more implicit activities (e.g., extensive reading). More specific techniques are reviewed such as glossing, corpus-based instruction, form-focused instruction, and strategy instruction.

In the reading section of this chapter, we look at how much vocabulary is needed to gain meaning-focused input through reading material written for native speakers. We then look at what a well-balanced reading program for learners of English as a foreign language should contain to maximise vocabulary growth, stressing the need to use vocabulary graded material, particularly graded readers. Such a course should provide opportunities for extensive reading, a focus on language features through intensive reading, and the development of reading fluency though speed reading. Finally, we look at how learners can be supported to read ungraded texts, using techniques such as narrow reading, pre–teaching, intensive reading, and glossing. In order to gain 98 per cent coverage of unsimplified text, learners need to know most of the high-frequency and mid-frequency words, totalling around 8,000–9,000 word families. In the writing section of this chapter, we look at the effect of vocabulary use on the quality of writing, measuring written productive knowledge of vocabulary and how to improve learners’ vocabulary use in writing.

The survival of a large number of twelfth- through fifteenth-century copies of canon law texts testifies to their great utility to contemporaneous masters and students, lawyers and judges, and ecclesiastics of varying ranks and occupations. In modern times these handwritten witnesses to the generation, study, and application of canon law continue to be carefully studied for their texts and accompanying notes, explanations, and glosses, written between the lines or in the margins of the page. Through comparison of divergent commentaries and the tabulation of variant editions of the texts, scholars have been able to trace the chronological development of judicial thought and practice. But this is not the whole story. While there is relatively little documentary evidence about the manner in which early classes of law were organized and taught before the institutionalization of learning in universities, the manuscript pages provide valuable evidence of input to and interaction with the text by master and student. Queries and elucidations transcribed in the margins of early canon law manuscripts, along with indications of cross-references in the same text, embody problems raised and discussed during lectures. Further graphic and pictorial signs mark material to be memorized or utilized in classroom debates.

Chapter 6 discusses how vocabulary can be learned incidentally from exposure. This includes incidental learning from reading, listening, television and movies, and other extramural exposure, such as the internet and gaming. It also looks at child L1 vocabulary acquisition.