Orton-Gillingham Reading Approach
Angela, Cara, Wendi
Definition
It's an approach (not a program, method, system, or technique)!
from www.ortonacademy.or/approach.php:
"Orton-Gillingham is an instructional approach intended primarily for use with persons who have difficulty with reading, spelling, and writing of the sort associated with dyslexia...[it is] language-based, multisensory, structured, sequential, cumulative, cognitive, and flexible."
History
Samuel Torrey Orton (1879-1948) and Anna Gillingham (1878-1963)
Orton: neuropsychiatrist and pathologist, studying reading and language processing difficulties. In 1920s, studied children who fit the current description of students with dyslexia.
Gillingham: educator and psychologist who worked with Orton to train other teachers and publish (with Bessie Stillman) the Orton-Gillingham manual: Remedial Training for Children with Specific Disability in Reading, Spelling, and Penmanship in 1935. Updated regularly, now known as The Gillingham Manual.
The Orton-Gillingham approach is considered to be the first to use the multi-sensory approach to teaching reading to students with disabilities like dyslexia.
Student Use
For whom is this designed?
- Students with dyslexia
- Most commonly associated with 1:1 instruction
- Because it is an approach (not a method), has the flexibility to be used with small groups or entire classooms
Description of Approach
Critial Characteristics
- Personalized
Adapted for individual learners
- Multisensory
Uses sight (visual processing), hearing (auditory processing), and touch and kinesthestetic (tactile-kinesthetic processing) activities to engage the whole brain and body in learning
- Diagnostic and Prescriptive
Instructor continually monitors progress (diagnostic) and designs future lessons to address areas of weakness (prescriptive)
- Direct Instruction
To ensure student knows what is being taught and why
- Systematic Phonics
Begins with simple phoneme/grapheme recognition
- Applied Linguistics
From decoding and encoding to syllabic and grammatic structures. Continually integrates reading with spelling and writing
- Linguistic Competence
Word order, sentence structure, meaning of words and phrases
- Systematic and Structured
Information presented in a planned, logical way
- Sequential, Incremental, and Cumulative
Students master content before moving forward, continual review of previously-learned material
- Continuous Feedback and Positive Reinforcement
Builds students' self-confidence
- Cognitive Approach
Students taught reasons for learning new strategies
- Emotionally Sound
"providing the experience of success"
Typical lessons last 45-60 minutes and have 7 components:
- Review of letters already known
- Introduction of new sound
- Individual words to read out loud (uses new and review sounds)
- Student writes new sounds from teacher's dictation
- Student writes new and review words (using only taught sounds)
- Dictation of controlled-text sentences
- Oral reading from controlled text
Advantages and Disadvantages
Advantages
- Many training/certification programs to ensure fidelity
- Systematic
- Confidence-building
- Personalized design to meet needs of individual students
Disadvantages
- No set materials
- Lesson planning can be labor-intensive
- While research has been done on the efficacy of reading systems based on the Orton-Gillingham approach (Wilson, Project Read, etc.), lack of empirical studies on Orton-Gillingham approach itself