Based on the teaching experiences of low-proficiency college students, the researcher investigated an effective way to teach reading comprehension, lexical acquisition and retention. The purpose of the study was to determine what effects would be found in the two situations and between them: the readers’ language proficiency and the two different types of gloss. There were 80 college students of different language proficiency involved in the study.
They took a pre-test that included 40 meaning-matched items corresponding to 40 target words in two reading passages. Next, they read the texts under two different conditions, one with a single gloss and the other with a multiple-choice gloss. Upon completion, the participants immediately took tests which included meaning-matched questions and comprehensive questions. Four weeks later post-tests were administered to the participants.
The results of the study were: (1) the glosses in the reading text facilitated the students’performance on vocabulary learning, (2) gloss types has no significant difference on word learning and reading comprehension, (3) language proficiency is a factor of students’performances on vocabulary learning and reading comprehension, and (4) there were no significant differences between the language proficiency and gloss types on the word learning and reading comprehension. These findings could be turned into suggestions for English reading and teaching. 本文的主旨在於探討大學生英語能力與二種中文註解方式，對於其閱讀理解、單字
學習與保留之影響。本文以80 位大三學生為對象，研究對象先參與前測，然後進行二
次閱讀教學，其中一篇文章是以中文單一註解來輔助學生閱讀理解，另一篇文章則以中
文多選式註解來輔助，接著，在每次閱讀教學後，學生須立刻接受後測，在二次教學結
束的各四週後，延遲後測被用來確定學生的學習成效。結果發現：
1. 中文註解可以提升學生的單字學習成效。
2. 不同的中文註解方式對於學生的單字學習、閱讀理解成效並無顯著差異。
3. 學生的英語能力是其單字學習、閱讀理解成效之重要影響因素。
4. 英語能力與中文註解方式對於學生的單字學習、閱讀理解並無明顯的交互作用。
