The Orton-Gillingham Approach is considered the first of its kind to implement and popularize the multisensory, visual-auditory-kinesthetic (VAK) approach to teaching students with dyslexia to read. The Orton-Gillingham Approach to reading instruction is based on the work of Dr. Samuel T. Orton and was developed into a remedial program manual by Anna Gillingham and Bessie Stillman in the late 1930's.
Orton-Gillingham instruction is simultaneously multi-sensory, structured, systematic and cumulative, synthetic and analytic. It is directly taught in a way that is diagnostic and prescriptive. We now use the term "structured literacy" to describe this approach, differentiating it from "whole language" which does not directly teach decoding and encoding. With today's brain spectrum imaging technology, we can actually observe the differences that occur in the brain as a student learns and practices using this multisensory method. We see the letters and phonemes, say the sounds, trace the letters, listening all the time - helping the brain to learn the "code" of reading. Learning the spelling rules that aren't taught in school, such as for ck-tch-dge after one short vowel in a one syllable word, makes sense out of what seems to be a crazy language. The scientific research proves over and over how effective this method of teaching is, especially for someone who isn't learning with the usual classroom methods. However, it is also excellent for typical readers - good instruction is good for everyone. |
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Phonemic awareness, the ability to discriminate, sequence, and manipulate sounds within words, underlies decoding (fancy way to say reading) and spelling. Some people have stronger phonemic awareness skills such as blending or segmenting sounds, but some people need to be taught. Then we teach the symbols - letters and combinations of letters - that represent those sounds. Add in the spelling rules that most teachers never learned about during their instruction, and you find that English isn't totally chaotic and confusing. Only approximately fifteen percent of words have to be memorized and learned as "sight" words.
If you are a person who has trouble learning in these areas due to neurobiological issues - such as dyslexia - you need to be taught using a multisensory approach to strengthen the connections in the brain. As you build those skills in a very systematic, cumulative, sequenced manner, you build the decoding skills that help you become a fluent and skilled reader.
Margaret Rawson, a pioneer in the O-G approach, wrote the following: "Dyslexic students need a different approach learning language from that employed in most classrooms. They need to be taught, slowly and thoroughly, the basic elements of their language - the sounds and the letters which represent them - and how to put these together and take them apart. They have to have their writing hands, eyes, ears, and voices working together in conscious organization and retention of their learning."