A review of studies of four vocabulary teaching methods--context learning, imagery, cognitive style, and natural word learning--resulted in several generalizations about their effectiveness. The generalizations are limited by problems such as the difficulty of defining when a word is "known" and the lack of a way to test permanence of word knowledge and by the awareness that no one method of instruction has conclusively been demonstrated to be the best for all students. Future research studies might explore the benefits of teaching roots and affixes, the effects of word difficulty on students' learning, the degree of transfer of word knowledge learned in different media, and the importance of cognitive style in word learning before college. (AEA)