Orton - Gillingham Approach

A Word of Caution Concerning Orton-Gillingham Reading Instruction

Many area schools are saying that they offer Orton-Gillingham reading instruction. It is wise to ask them if their teacher is a Certified member of The Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators or is an Associate member of AOGPE working directly under a Fellow, or is a graduate of an International Multisensory Structured Language Education Council (IMSLEC) program.

Orton-Gillingham is difficult to teach effectively and requires careful supervised training of the teachers using it. The Academy was started for the purpose of providing a standard of professional training for individuals and schools who offer these services. Many individuals and schools have purchased workbooks and readers published by special publishers, but have only an overview training of several days or two weeks.

Both the Academy and the International Multisensory Structured Language Education Council (IMSLEC) require supervised internships for accredited programs and for certified individuals. These internships consist of one school year for teaching the Orton-Gillingham Approach under direct supervision of a Fellow and three years before teaching independently. In addition, there are professional book reading lists to master and case studies to write.

For your child's success in reading, it is wise to ask questions and even to ask for proof of training when putting your child in a program said to be Orton-Gillingham.

The education of its students is grounded in the work of Dr. Samuel Torry Orton and the Principles of The International Dyslexia Association. This includes multisensory, sequential, structured, and cumulative language teaching strategies, such as those described by The International Multisensory Structured Language Education Council and The Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators. These are implemented using curriculum delivery systems integrated into Greenhills curriculum by Professional Advisory Council member, C. Wilson Anderson, Jr. for small group teaching.

The wonderful result of this teaching approach is that it actually "teaches out" this lack of a student's innate ability to recognize words by sight alone. This phonemic ability, once learned, can then be used the same as if the student was born with this knowledge. This knowledge can be used at his or her normal level of thinking ability forever. Reading speed will usually be slower than the speed of students who never had this difficulty, but reading comprehension will be excellent. If basic orthographic knowledge and phonemic knowledge are mastered, literacy results. Spelling will usually lag behind reading ability and will usually require a spell checker and careful proof reading.

Written expression is the last skill mastered by dyslexic/specific learning disability students. Partly, this is due to the necessity to organize and combine large quantities of information. The student's ability for writing accurate, enriched sentences, paragraphs, and essays requires direct teaching. Greenhills enhances this teaching by using manipulatives. These allow the student to involve his or her kinesthetic sense, making this teaching and learning multisensory. In addition, this task is broken into small pieces. Paragraph structure is taught sentence by sentence with a thesis sentence, detail sentences, and a concluding sentence. When paragraph construction is mastered, essay writing is taught in the same manner.

The language program at Greenhills provides the students with a clear understanding of language rules, from basic phonetics to the sophisticated concepts of word structures and derivations. As examples, the six types of syllables, which determine vowel sounds, suffix spelling rules, and rules for syllable division, are taught. As well, mnemonic devices (memory tricks) are taught for learning the 12% of English words that are non-phonetic.

In the Orton-Gillingham class, language arts are taught as one integrated whole with the same words taught for reading, handwriting, and spelling. It is important that these students have an orderly, systematic way of working out words for both reading and spelling. Daily written phonics drill is based on an alphabetic approach to language retraining that ties together the visual, auditory and kinesthetic pathways. Learning these rules in the Orton-Gillingham daily therapy class, gives students the tools to use language effectively in literature, composition, and other classes.

The student's multisensory response to these language elements builds on the dyslexic's strengths while strengthening weak learning channels by using all senses simultaneously: the visual (see it), auditory (say it), and kinesthetic (feel it) senses. This multisensory program creates a thorough understanding of language.