Considerable research has recently been conducted into the effectiveness
of vocabulary teaching and learning through various activities or tasks. Lee
and Muncie (2006) showed that a post-reading composition task helped ESL
students improve the productive use of higher-level target vocabulary. Newton
(1995) pointed out that students made more vocabulary gains when
engaging in communicative tasks that demanded interactions than when
negotiating word meanings explicitly. Wesche and Paribakht (2000) demonstrated
that students learned vocabulary more effectively when they
engaged in text-based vocabulary exercises in addition to reading a text than
when they read multiple texts without exercises, because in the latter case,
they could learn not only target words, but also their lexical features. Further,
Folse (2006) suggested that how frequently students retrieved unfamiliar
words influenced their retention more than how deeply they were involved
in processing them, which demonstrates that students could improve their
retention of new target words more while engaging in multiple fill-in-theblank
exercises than while writing one original sentence with each target
word. Finally, Nassaji (2003) suggested that ESL students might grope ineffectively
for lexical inferences about word meanings from context, so that
teachers should provide them with a chance to identify and define exact
meanings for unknown words.