The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of generative learning activities and attention focusing devices on students' performance, self- confidence, attitudes, time to learn, quality of generations and retention of learning. Generative learning activities used in this study were summarizing, creating-analogy and asking-question. The written instructional material was related to the nutrition topic, and included in two levels; prose text and enriched text. Attention focusing devices used in the enriched texts were underlining for concepts, bold fonts for definitions and italics for examples. Subjects consisted of 1 17 students from the three English language preparation classes of Çankaya High School. All subjects were at high academic achievement level. Subjects, before the beginning of experiment, participated to the training program on generative learning activities. In the training session, pretest was administered to determine the levels of students' preknowledge on nutrition. According to results of the pretest, subjects were randomly assigned to one of the six experimental groups; (1) summarizing / prose text, (2) summarizing / enriched text, (3) asking-question / prose text, (4) asking-question / enriched text, (5) creating-analogy / prose text and (6) creating-analogy / enriched text. First day of the experiment, subjects studied half of the instructional material according to their groups' tasks who are generated their own summaries, questions or analogies. Second day of the experiment, subjects continued these activities for other half of the material and then posttest and attitude questionnaire were administered. The whole experiment lasted four hours in a period of two days. Two weeks later from the end of experiment an identical posttest administered again to determine the retention of learning. Results showed that generative learning activities significantly improved students' posttest performance, self-confidence and retention of learning. All subjects' attitudes were positive regarding to the content of instructional material, generative learning activities and types of text. Attention focusing devices used in the enriched texts did not affect students' performance or retention of learning but significantly improved students' self-confidence and attitudes to this type of text. Results also showed that asking-question activity took significantly less time than summarizing and creating-analogy. However, in terms of students' generations, quality of summaries were found significantly higher than questions and analogies.