ABSTRACT
Two parallel developments in the last decade within the fields of applied linguistics and language teaching converge in this paper: the revived interest in vocabulary and the emphasis on the teaching of languages communicatively. I have stated my commitment to the first of these two elsewhere, and provided what I hope is a useful summary of the arguments (McCarthy 1984); the second is a fait accompli whose internal debates are too vast to be entered here, apart from a general need to reiterate one of the implications of communicative language pedagogy: that spoken, not written, data should be the model where the teaching of spoken language is concerned.
