ABSTRACT
The current interest in linguistic units within words and beyond words should not let us lose sight of the value of words themselves in second language vocabulary development, single words as they appear in written texts with spaces before and after. Learners believe in the value of learning such words, and this chapter will argue that in many ways they are right. Single words are important because meanings are typically inferred from monosemes attached to single words; single words are the linguistic unit most likely to have generalizable characteristics; and single words are the unit that allows learners to leverage their mother tongues into the acquisition of a second or foreign language. The chapter then goes on to situate single-word acquisition in the overall picture of lexical acquisition and outline the resources available for learning single-word items as well as the issues involved in selecting them.
