The present study was an attempt to conduct a comparative study of presenting vocabulary trough reading comprehension to male/female EFL freshman students in three different ways: foot note, endnote, and teacher’s elaboration. To do so, 170 freshman students of Arak and Qom Universities who study translation for degrees in BA took part in the present study. They included both male and female students and their age-range is between 18 to 22. All the participants used footnote glosses, endnote glosses, and teacher’s elaboration respectively as the treatment once a week; two hours for the session, during attending reading course. This process took four months and the total number of sessions was sixteen on the whole. Then, after administering final test, test items were divided into three groups: footnote group, endnote group, and teacher’s elaboration group. Two instruments were employed in this investigation: Reading Comprehension Placement Test and VLT (Vocabulary Level Test). One-Way ANOVA was conducted to analyze the means of three independent groups in order to determine whether there is statistical evidence that the associated population means are significantly different. The findings revealed that students in footnote group had a significant improvement during research time. By far, there was achieved information to find out although students in teacher’s elaboration and endnote groups had a sort of improvement, however it was not enough to mention that students are still having significant improvement in their vocabulary achievement. In addition, investigating the effect of gender on vocabulary learning, the results indicated that female participants outperformed males in the final exam.
