What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction (Fourth Edition) —
Abstract of

Chapter 1
The Relation Between Alphabetic Basics, Word Recognition, and Reading

Marilyn Jager Adams

This chapter begins by taking a look at teachers' approach to providing an 8-year-old boy with limited English proficiency with one-on-one support with English language development and reading. For his English language development, the teachers' core approach had been centered on reading books aloud to him, actively engaging him throughout. For his reading, they had set out a systematic plan, beginning with the basics. His English was coming nicely, but his reading was not. Even though he had mastered letter recognition, primary letter–sound knowledge, and initial letter segmentation, learning to decode was proving very difficult. In the effort to get him going, the teachers had been staying after school with him four days a week to work on decoding the nonsense words from the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS; see dibels.uoregon.edu) materials. And still he was making little progress. The question addressed in this chapter is whether the teachers' approach toward developing the student's decoding skills was well founded, and why or why not.

Adams, M. (2011). The Relation Between Alphabetic Basics, Word Recognition, and Reading. In S. Samuels, & A.E. Farstrup (Eds.), What Research Has to Say About Reading Instruction (Fourth Edition) (pp. 4-24). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.