The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary provides two definitions for the word dictionary. These are as follows: (1) “a book dealing with the words of a language, so as to bring forth their orthography, pronunciation, signification, and use, their synonyms, derivation and history, or at least some of these... a word-book, vocabulary, lexicon; (2) by extension: a book of information or reference on any subject or branch of knowledge, the items of which are arranged alphabetically”. (1980, vol. 1, p. 544).

Most teacher education programmes in the Caribbean and other parts of the world continue to face the challenge of training teachers who are often not equipped with the reading comprehension strategies necessary for the academic pursuits of preservice training. The majority of these strategies relate to metacomprehension, that is, awareness of, and control over, the requirements of "reading to learn” tasks.

Reading comprehension, that is, functional literacy, was tested among a sample of 3,269 grade 6 students in Jamaican primary and all-age schools. The percentages of functional literacy varied greatly, as did the statistically significant differences in mean scores across school types, geographical locations, and sexes. In addition, performance in paragraph comprehension was more adversely affected by the levels of thinking the questions required than by the difficulty level of the paragraphs. The findings carry important implications for reading instruction.