In the last two decades, vocabulary has been stimulating the interest of investigators sop much so that the continual advance of research in the field has led to an ongoing revolution in second language pedagogy and research. Disappointingly, however, little attention is given to vocabulary instruction, on the assumption that new words can be picked up incidentally and on their own, an assumption that lacks empirical support. In this \\\"aptitude-treatment instruction\\\" study, a framework developed for presenting vocabulary to learners is elaborated in detail, with a view to provide some theoretical and empirical ground for the usefulness of the framework. The study draws on psychological investigation on the mental lexicon and linguistic research into the organization of lexis as well as recent developments in vocabulary learning and teaching. It attempts to provide some theoretical and empirical evidence on how learning vocabulary takes place.

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