A great deal has been written in the English as a second language (ESL) literature on what vocabulary building entails and on how vocabulary should be taught. There is, however, little consensus on methodology and there are few good vocabulary texts. In order to develop a procedure for vocabulary building in ESL, some recent articles on vocabulary are reviewed. These articles include studies on first language acquisition, second language learning, semantic relationships between lexical items, and the effectiveness of inductive versus deductive teaching methods. Three basic assumptions are accepted as important for direct vocabulary instruction and for facilitating vocabulary building. These assumptions are: (1) collocations, or associations, have to be taught; (2) knowing a word entails knowledge of the network of associations between that word and other words in the language; and (3) knowing a word means knowing the semantic value of the word. Two vocabulary exercises are presented to illustrate the theory and method derived from the review of the literature. Both are presented inductively; the first illustrates an exercise on semantic field relationship, and the second is on collocations. (AMH)