What is the Orton-Gillingham approach?

Orton-Gillingham is a teaching approach designed to help struggling readers. The Academy of

Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators describes it as “language-based, multisensory,
structured, sequential, cumulative, cognitive, and flexible.” At its most basic, the approach
teaches the connections between sounds and letters, and builds on these skills over time.

• O-G focuses on reading at the word level.

• O-G uses multiple ways of teaching: seeing, saying, sounding out, tracing, writing.
• O-G emphasizes “how” and “why” so that students can recognize consistent rules and
patterns.
• Students are taught individually or in small groups.
• Instruction is highly structured and teaches skills in a particular order based on how
children naturally develop language.
• Students must master a skill before moving on to the next.

How was Orton-Gillingham developed?

The approach gets its name from the work of Samuel T. Orton (1879-1948), a neuropsychiatrist
and pathologist, and Anna Gillingham (1878-1963), an educator and psychologist.

• Orton was a pioneer in the study of reading failure and related language processing
difficulties.
• He identified dyslexia as an education problem in the 1920s after working with many
children who had been referred to him for intellectual disabilities. He found that while
they struggled to read, most had normal or above average IQs.
• Orton suspected that dyslexia is a neurological problem, a failure of the left side of the
brain to dominate over the right while reading.
• Gillingham worked with Orton to develop a multisensory reading program that
integrated right- and left-brain functions.
• Gillingham developed the concept of the language triangle which is composed of
auditory, visual and kinesthetic aspects.
• She organized the steps of teaching language, beginning with simple sounds and moving
on to syllables, words, phrases, and finally sentences.

What are some methods that use the Orton-Gillingham approach?

• Wilson Reading System

• Barton Reading Program
• Phonics First
• Sounds in Syllables