Oh dear, coding VHDL on a FPGA board, wanting to produce text on a VGA screen, but not a clue about video basics... Where to start? :?:
How about here:
Wikipedia - raster scan.
VGA should be a relatively simple video interface to wire a FPGA onto - analog video with separate R/G/B, horizontal and vertical sync inputs. I'd start with some simple pattern generation, see **broken link removed** for an example. Also you'll need to change pin assignments to match your board.
After that you can decide whether you want full bitmap capability (read: external RAM to hold bitmap data), or text-only (in which case you
might be able to use FPGA internal RAM blocks for text contents and/or bitmap font data). Don't forget to check
OpenCores - they have some VGA controller projects there.