Glosses are summaries of the meanings of words, usually found as notes in the margin or between the lines of a text. Glosses can be interpretations, explanations or translations.

Example
Learners work together on a project to provide a gloss for a text on pub life in the UK, investigating the socio-cultural significance of the language in the text.

In the classroom
One interesting gloss exercise is to translate terms within a text into L1. If this is done in groups, then various communicative and analytical aims can be introduced.