The effectiveness of three instructional approaches was investigated in a study of how best to facilitate vocabulary acquisition. The three approaches were (1) the cognitive approach, a method employing dictionary worksheets and patterned after the most commonly used method of teaching vocabulary; (2) the affective approach, which urged students to "anchor" new word meanings to subjective associations and prior experiences; and (3) the proprioceptive approach, which employed kinesthetic activities to supplement visual and auditory stimuli in a manner that helped students develop an internal counterpart to the cognitive associations of a word. Subjects were 27 fifth and sixth grade students randomly assigned to six treatment groups that were rotated by treatment, lesson time, teacher, and lesson content. Words to be taught and tested were taken from the "Teacher's Word Book of 30,000 Words." Students completed posttests that measured their ability to write the meaning of a word, to choose a word's meaning from a list of possible answers, and to complete a sentence using one of three words. Results indicated that the proprioceptive and affective approaches to vocabulary acquisition were more enhancing of word concept formation than the cognitive approach, which was adequate when the test task was least demanding of deep learning. (FL)