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This study investigated the effectiveness of the Vocabulary Overview Guide in improving vocabulary comprehension and retention of terms from connected discourse. The guide incorporates a graphic organizer to relate text information, personal clues to associate terms with background knowledge, and a selfmonitoring checklist to assess understanding. This strategy was compared to a traditional method of listing and studying definitions. Subjects, developmental college readers, were administered pretests, posttests, and delayed posttests. An Analysis of Variance indicated that the Vocabulary Overview Guide group was significantly superior to the traditional group in improving vocabulary comprehension and retention and in increasing metacognitive awareness on post and delayed posttests.

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Abstract. Three procedures were used to help sixth-grade children increase inferential reading comprehension with expository text: a structured overview to activate background knowledge, the cloze procedure to develop an inferential thinking strategy, and a self-monitoring checklist to train the subjects to use the strategy independently. There were two treatment groups. One used the cloze procedure to integrate text and background knowledge and the checklist to maintain the strategy; the other used both the structured overview and the cloze procedure with the checklist. A control group read the same materials as the other two groups, but was not trained in any strategy. Posttests periodically measured the students' progress and ability to infer. Transfer and delayed transfer tests measured the application of inferential skills to untaught materials immediately after instruction and six weeks thereafter without further instruction. Results indicated that students in both treatment groups increased their inferential comprehension skills as measured by both the immediate and delayed transfer tests. Results also indicated that below average readers benefitted most from the instruction.Recent research in reading assumes that comprehension is a constructive process in which meaning is derived from the text and from interactions between the text and the background knowledge of the reader. In this process the reader's background knowledge fulfills a vital role in at least two respects. First, as the reader interacts with the information in the text, his/her prior knowledge affects his/her interpretation of the text and deter-1