Incidental learning of vocabulary from context while reading is a major avenue to lexical growth in either a first or second language (Day, Omura, & Hiramitsu, 1991; Jenkins, Stein, & Wysocki, 1984; Krashen, 1989; Nagy, Anderson, & Herman, 1987; Schouten-van Parreren, 1989). There is growing evidence to suggest, however, that inferring the meaning of new vocabulary in context is a lengthy and error-prone undertaking which, by itself, is an inefficient way of mastering second language vocabulary. The incidental learning of words in context may be compromised by a variety of factors including, for example: too few encounters with specific words (Hulstijn, 1992); contextual clues that are either misleading (Holmes & Ramos, 1993; Laufer, 1989), intrinsically unhelpful (Beck, McKeown, & McCaslin, 1983; Schouten-van Parreren, 1989), or beyond the learner's linguistic capacity to use (Nation, 1993); or conversely, contextual clues that are so obvious that they do not promote enough attention to a given word (Mondria & Wit-de Boer, 1991).