According to Blachowicz, Fisher, and Watts (2005), the difficulties of word learning lies at least
in three things: (1) the word characteristics itself, (2) the learner characteristics, (3) the level of
word learning desired. All word learning needs a meta-cognitive approach in spite of their variety of inherent difficulty. Students first should attend to word and recognize it as unknown, then desire to know that word and engage actively in the learning process actively, and at the end integrate both definitional and contextual information and new and known information as well.
For example, to understand the word exasperate (to make somebody very angry by repeating an
annoying behavior), learner should know what the word means, how it is used and in what
context it is used, and how it relates to what he or she already knows.