I share the disdain that several of you have expressed for vocabulary
books and for the type of vocabulary "instruction" that requires
students to "learn" X number of words per week.  Such an approach runs
absolutely counter to everything that we have discovered about how
humans learn.  Students cram the words into rote memory, get through
the test, and promptly "forget" them.

There is a crucial distinction that must be kept in mind when working
with vocabulary:  active vs. passive vocabulary.  Passive refers to
those words that we recognize when we see them, but that we don't use
when we speak or write.  Perhaps we aren't familiar enough with the
nuances of a word, or perhaps we don't know the exact grammatical
environment that it requires, or perhaps we don't know exactly how to
spell or pronounce it, or whatever.  The bottom line is that there are
many words that we simply do not feel comfortable using, but they
cause us no problem when we read or hear them.

Most of us have an active vocabulary that is much smaller than our
passive one.  The gap between a high school student's active
vocabulary and the teacher's, for example, isn't nearly as large as
the gap between their respective passive vocabularies.  Students need
to be able to build their _passive_ vocabularies so that they can read
and comprehend textbooks, literature, etc.; active vocabulary
acquisition, a poorly understood process at best, is a much slower
phenomenon, requiring a lot of repeated contextualized exposure. 
Bill's efforts to create networks of words is in perfect harmony with
human cognition and an excellent way to build word recognition skills.

I wrote a text _way_ back in the 1980s for ESL students that worked on
passive vocabulary building from what I called the Keyword Approach: 
the whole intent was to help students associate unknown words with
words they already knew.  For example, I would take a keyword that
they knew, like "strange," and add five words they might not know to
it, words such as bizarre, eccentric, quaint, peculiar, weird.  I
would then give them contextualized opportunities to substitute the
keyword for the new word.  (This is a VERY superficial overview of the
process.)  They were never required to _use_ the words, however. 
Empirical testing showed that it was significantly more effective than
traditional vocabulary instruction.  I don't know if such an approach
would help native speakers or not.

John

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