When two adults read eleven paragraphs, assigned a meaning to the target word in each paragrah, and answered questions about their strategies for dealing with the difficult/unknown words, they exhibited four strategies, outside of actual definition, that skilled readers use to deal with such words. The most often used strategy is paragraph restatement, essentially an avoidance strategy, by which the reader exhibits an understanding of the passage without a distinct understanding of the word. The second strategy, syntactic analysis, is an expressed utilization of the grammatical position of the word in the sentence without necessarily being semantically correct. The third approach, visual or auditory word part analysis, is a more advanced approach in which the reader deals with the word as a unit rather than as an embedded part of a sentence. The fourth strategy, recall, may represent an important stage in the development of word meaning; this approach indicates a familiarity with the word, but only through a problematical storage in memory (such as remembering the word in a specific context, as a memorized poem) instead of as an individual word. Follow-up studies also indicate a general movement of the words in subsequent encounters from paragraph restatement to the other categories that require more awareness of individual words. (RL)