ABSTRACT
Any discussion of vocabulary acquisition and of language performance in general needs to draw a clear distinction between comprehension and production, for these seem to be different skills that require different methods in the classroom. Comprehension of vocabulary relies on strategies that permit one to understand words and store them, to commit them to memory, that is, while production concerns strategies that activate one’s storage by retrieving these words from memory, and by using them in appropriate situations. The priority this distinction assigns to comprehension is one of many reasons why a growing number of researchers believe that comprehension should precede production in language teaching (Asher 1969; Postovskv 1974). The object of a vocabulary lesson is one of enhancing the different strategies for comprehension and production.
