Obviously, only a modest portion of those newly mastered words were a result of direct instruction in classrooms.
Students learn the rest through natural immersion in reading and other literacy activities.
Strategies that help students monitor their vocabulary development can stimulate this ongoing process of broadening one's vocabulary. Readers become deeply involved in the overall story or message of a text and do not pay careful attention to specific elements such as unknown vocabulary. Readers may be reading to obtain a general sense of a passage and they skip anything that is unfamiliar. In this case, students are not expected to immediately develop mastery of these words. As they read various class materials, as well as materials on their own, they should lightly circle unknown words.