What is Orton-Gillingham?
Orton-Gillingham (OG) is a direct, multisensory, structured, and diagnostic way to teach the connections between sounds and letters.
The OG approach offers clear, straightforward instruction on the sound each alphabet letter makes and how those letters are combined to represent words.
This method is not new or a fad but has been widely used and validated in classrooms, private tutoring and research for over 80 years. There are many publishers of Orton-Gillingham methods. At Aspire Academy, we use the Wilson Reading System created by Barbara Wilson. It takes the Orton-Gillingham method and teaches it using the five building blocks of reading in every lesson. It has robust vocabulary, plenty of decodable text for practice of skills, and prescribed ways to teach prefixes, suffixes, sight words, latin roots and base words. It provides training, published materials and a robust web site as resources to schools, teachers, and tutoring centers.
The OG method allows struggling readers to master the reading code.
80% of students who struggle with reading do not have the sound-to-letter symbol connection mastered. Struggling readers have a much harder time associating and memorizing the sounds of our language to printed, two-dimensional symbols. They develop into poor decoders and cannot attain fluency. Students with reading struggles need more straightforward, clear and detailed instruction on the relationship of spoken sounds to the written symbols than what is typically taught in school.
Typical readers learn the code quickly. But struggling readers need to be taught explicitly how the code works.
Take the example of the /k/ sound in English, English uses a C, K, CK and even the CH to represent the sound /k/.
The /k/ sound in English can be represented in printed-text four different ways:
C, K, CK and CH (as in the word “Christmas”)
CK usually occurs at the end of one-syllable words, right after a short vowel as in… sock, thick, luck
However, when the one-syllable word has a vowel followed by another consonant as in dark or thank the C is dropped, and the word ends in just a K, most of the time.
Struggling readers recognize the inconsistency with how the /k/ sound is written in English, and need to know the logic to decipher the code. They need more direct instruction on how spoken sounds and letters represent themselves in the English language.
So, the logic of the English language can get very confusing for struggling readers, UNLESS it is taught in a very systematic, cumulative (building up in complexity), and multi-sensory way that is student-paced — meaning the student does not move forward until they have mastered the lesson and each skill is automatically done without prompting or correction.
What is multi-sensory?
The Orton-Gillingham approach is multi-sensory. Every concept is taught using a combination of:
Sight, Sound, Touch, Speaking, Listening, Writing.
Each lesson lasts 60 minutes, and each concept is taught 10 consistent ways using sight, visual memory, sound, touch (tapping out the sounds of words using fingers), speaking the words and writing the words. By completing two hours of multi-sensory lessons a week, in a systematic way that slowly builds at the student’s pace, the brain physically builds pathways to read and associate sounds to symbols in the most effective manner. fMRI studies show that Orton-Gillingham instruction, taught as designed by a trained instructor, will change the neuro-pathways in the brain.
This is why it is SO IMPORTANT that the instruction is given with fidelity — strict adherence to each of the 10 parts of the lesson and the explanations of spelling rules of the English language.
When your child finishes with an Orton-Gillingham approach, they will have learned all the spelling rules of the English language, and be able to explain why things are spelled the way they are better than most American English teachers. Spelling is the window into how the brain is associating the sounds of language with the printed form of the language. Spelling and reading are woven together and show an accurate picture of how your child is associating sounds and symbols.
Helping Your Child Succed
Reading challenges in no way reflect a student’s intelligence, but instead demonstrate a subconscious struggle with the inconsistency of how sounds are written. Struggling readers typically require explicit, direct instruction to understand the English spelling system.
The first step towards improving your child’s reading and spelling is a screening to determine their decoding abilities and processing of language sounds. Instructors at Aspire then follow the Wilson OG approach to teach reading and spelling skills so children succeed.
With an OG approach, students master each reading and spelling skill before they move on to the next. By breaking words down into their individual letters and sounds, the guesswork is taken out of the process of learning to read. Each student’s performance is closely monitored every step of the way to determine areas of both concern and progress. Each time a lesson is crafted, the tutor carefully analyzes previous lessons to review concepts that the individual student finds challenging, and to determine when to introduce new concepts. This continuous review, and yet careful introduction of new concepts, ensures the student develops automaticity for past concepts, but keeps progressing forward.
With the Orton-Gillingham approach, students are taught the English reading code in a logical progression that allows them to overcome their challenges and gain confidence as they move forward in their education—and that’s something worth celebrating!