This study investigated the effects of three different approaches to vocabulary instruction on students' ability to learn initial meanings of new words: traditional definitions, friendly definitions, and parsing. Fourth and fifth grade students enrolled in a rural elementary school were introduced to new vocabulary terms in traditional, friendly definitions, and parsing conditions. Tasks to assess students understanding of the new terms included sentence generation, and responses to open ended questions about each term. Results indicated that across all three conditions no significant differences were found for sentence generation tasks. For open ended question tasks differences were found indicating students performed significantly better with traditional and friendly definitions than parsing. Qualitative analysis indicated that parsing was not only inadequate, but detrimental to learning new words from definitions. It was hypothesized that the design of the study may have influenced results. Implications for instruction and further research were discussed
