Grabe’s interpretation of research findings is well founded and bears witness to the increasing interest in vocabulary acquisition in the field of applied linguistics. It sheds light on the process and describes the requisite conditions for vocabulary learning to take place. Perhaps the fundamental tenet here is that vocabulary acquisition takes time. On the one hand, teachers need to find ways to present words or word combinations in clear and varied contexts, to practice them in a number of ways, to create tasks in which the learners need to
wrestle with the word combinations and do interesting things with them. On the other hand, learners need to take responsibility for their own learning and become fully aware of the importance of recording, sorting and using words. This does not happen overnight. In a recent