ABSTRACT
The history of research on vocabulary instruction is rich and complex. A topic of great interest in the early decades of educational research, particularly with the work of E. L. Thorndike and his students, it waned as a subject of investigation in the 1950s. Surveys of educational practice (Dale, Razik, & Petty, 1973; Petty, Herold, & Stoll, 1967) suggested that vocabulary instruction through the early 1970s was little informed by prior research and that many classroom questions were unaddressed. In the mid 1970s, a review of reading research (Calfee & Drum, 1978) called vocabulary research a "vanishing species." Indeed, the first Handbook of Reading Research (Pearson, 1984) devoted only a few pages to vocabulary research.
