“Even with instruction and good strategies, the task of acquiring an adequate vocabulary is daunting. What does it mean to ‘know’ a word: •  Grasp the general meaning in a familiar context? •  Provide a definition or a translation equivalent? •  Provide appropriate word associations? •  Identify its component parts or etymology? •  Use the word to complete a sentence or to create a new sentence? •  Use it metaphorically? •  Understand a joke that uses homonyms (words that sound alike but mean different things, such as ‘cents’, ‘sense’, ‘scents’)? Second language learners whose goal is to use the language for both social and academic purposes must learn to do all these things.”