Elementary students enter school knowing approximately 10,00 words, but by the time they leave, they have mastered more than 8 times as many (Marinellie & Kneilie, 2012; MacWhinney, 2011). How do children achieve that?

1. Children are immersed in engaging experiences with explicit instruction that focuses on key concepts. Explicit instruction is valuable for learning terms that are unlikely to be acquired incidentally, and it's particularly important for abstract, complex, and technical terms with precise definitions. 2. Children encounter words in context, and this process relates to semantics, which is a branch of linguistic that examines the meaning of words (Mayor & Plunkett, 2010). For example, the sentence "They were too close to the door to close it," has the word close in 2 different meanings, and the meanings are determined by the context of the sentence.