ABSTRACT
The chapter begins with a research overview of how vocabulary knowledge develops. It provides a brief review of the research surrounding vocabulary instruction and examines several effective instructional practices that align with Graves's suggestions. M. G. McKeown and L. Kucan provide several useful ways teachers can assess students' word knowledge through instructional activities. For example, instruction/assessment can include asking students to compare target words to other words, having students distinguish between examples and nonexamples of taught words, and providing context interpretation tasks that ask readers to make inferences about a targeted word used in context. Dictionaries serve a valuable purpose but should be used with the right instructional goal in mind. Dictionaries can be a meaningful tool: They can help writers apply a word correctly or help clarify a word meaning.
