ABSTRACT
To write about vocabulary instruction and development in a handbook oriented towards teachers and researchers, authors have to answer the question, “What else is there to say?” Over the last three decades, numerous instructional investigations have taken place and rich summaries of research have been written. The second Handbook of Reading Research (Barr, Kamil, Mosenthal, & Pearson, 1991), contained two chapters on vocabulary, one dealing with vocabulary processes (Anderson & Nagy, 1991) and a second with vocabulary development (Beck & McKeown, 1991). These same topics were also addressed in the third Handbook of Reading Research (Blachowicz & Fisher, 2000; Nagy & Scott, 2000) in the Handbook of Teaching the English Language Arts (Baumann & Kame’enui, 1991), and in other comprehensive reviews (Farstrup & Samuels, 2008).
