Since the mastery of any subject matter depends on learning its key concepts--its language--content area teachers should use innovative vocabulary development exercises to help their students master the language of the subject area. Teachers should try to coordinate vocabulary study with other learning tasks instead of depending on dull, artificial word drills. Vocabulary development activities should stimulate each student's natural curiosity; they also need to be structured yet varied, reflecting different student needs and learning styles. Some potentially helpful activities include building "language trees" and "rainbows of words," using the letters of students' names to generate new words, focusing on parts of words to expand word power from one content area to another, applying word identification skills to a "name hunt" game, matching words with their definitions and with examples of the use in context, and answering questions about jobs to learn occupational nouns. (A list of 55 techniques for teaching words is attached.) (RL)