Nowadays, there are many teaching approaches available to help us and our kids. Learning may not come easy to some of us but there is nothing wrong with that. First step to solve a problem is admitting you have one and working toward correcting it.
Dyslexia is one of these learning problems and the Orton-Gillingham approach is one of the solutions offered to help.
Dyslexia
It is a neurological condition with some genetic components that has nothing to do with the lack of good teaching; it’s a language-based learning disability that doesn’t affect intelligence or perceptual senses, but rather affects both oral and written language.
Dyslexia is not that uncommon; in fact according to the National Institutes of Health 5-10% of the general population in the USA have dyslexia.
There is a silver lining to having dyslexia; with time you can even use it to your advantage. How? Well, Matthew H. Schneps is the best example for that.
He is a dyslexic astrophysicist who founded the Laboratory for Visual Learning to investigate the consequences of cognitive diversity on learning. He conducts research about dyslexia at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and right now his research is proving that with reading difficulties can come other cognitive strengths.
Symptoms:
Some of the signs of dyslexia aren’t that easy to spot, especially with children. The problem might not be noticed until your kid endrolls in school and his/her teacher reports it.
But if you notice early on that your child doesn’t start talking by the age of 2 years old or tends to learn new words slowly, that might be the cue for you.
Apparent symptoms:
In Kids:
Since dyslexia is categorized under the learning disabilities in the federal special education law, schools are in charge of doing tests to determine disabilities.
This testing looks at a number of skills related to reading such as: decoding, phonological awareness and comprehension. Here is an example: Lexercise.
The following symptoms are seen in a young child with dyslexia:
- Difficulty spelling
- Difficulty writing
- Slow reading and/or reading below average level
- Problem with learning the names and sounds of letters
- Low confidence or behavioral problems
In teenagers and adults:
- Avoiding activities that involve reading
- Trouble learning a foreign language
- Difficulty memorizing and doing math problems
- Difficulty with organization and time management
Here is a test to find out more: DyslexiaTest
The Orton-Gillingham Approach
Since reading and writing are a basic skill in school, kids with dyslexia should be given priority and special care or else they’ll never be able to keep up with their peers, they’ll withdraw, lose their self esteem and begin to feel self-conscious about themselves.
There is no cure, prevention or a direct answer to this problem but there is help. It can be managed with special instructions and support. The Orton-Gillingham Approach provides that.
What is it?
The Orton-Gillingham approach is a step-by-step technique that teaches kids how to match letters with sounds, and recognize letter sounds in words.
It is practiced as an approach, not as a system or method. Moreover, it was named after its pioneers Samuel T. Orton and Anna Gillingham.
Both of whom focused their work on reading failures and related language-processing difficulties, to later on identify the syndrome of dyslexia as an educational problem.
How does it work?
Robert Buck once said “If children can’t learn the way we teach, then we have to teach the way they learn”.
With that being said, teachers often use this approach one on one with students in a direct, explicit, systematic, cumulative, and multi-sensory fashion.
The basic idea is that some students, particularly students with learning disabilities like dyslexia, benefit from using their senses to activate and retrain parts of the brain that are used in reading.
As a result, the Orton-Gillingham based-instructions feature a lot of interesting hands-on activities. It works like this:
1. Making use of Phonogram cards:
Before we explain how teachers make use of these cards, we first have to go through a few things:
1. A phonogram is a letter or combination of letters that represent a sound, for example: bt is a phonogram that sounds as /t/ in the word doubt.
2. Phonogram cards: are flashcards that have two sides. Like the example picture, The front of the card shows the phonogram (bt), this is the side we show the students.
The back of the card has information for the teacher. It shows the sound of the phonogram (t sound), along with a keyword (doubt).
Now, teachers can review what students know using these flash cards that are different in colors. For example: the vowels card might be blue and the consonants one might be white.
Before any new lessons, teachers make use of these cards with their students, it is believed that reviewing them repeatedly over days and weeks will eventually help them to remember words.
2. Introducing a new skill:
Pictures are used to introduce a new sound or spelling. This is considered as a creative way for students to see the concept (visual), hear themselves practice it (auditory) and move it (kinesthetic) so that it sticks in their minds.
3.Blending drill:
The student practices reading nonsense words, these nonsense words forces him/her to use decoding and not memorization skills. For example: we can use phonogram cards here.
Why do we use these cards?
It’s simple really, we use them to blend sounds into words.
As you can see in the example picture, phonogram cards are separated into three piles, the vowel card is put in the middle pile, and students are asked to point to the sound card from left to right and then blend the sounds into a nonsense word. In this case, the nonsense word is bab.
The teacher can flip the cards from the different columns to make different combinations. This strategy is not only helpful but also fun.
4.Managing Red words:
Red Words are those words that cannot be sounded out phonetically and do not follow any particular phonemic rule, they are red because they symbolize a stop sign where students have to stop and think about them.
They are sometimes called sight words, or star words. For example: right, flight, and give.
For students to read easily they need to be be familiar with these words, and in normal circumstances, memorize them. In the Orton-Gillingham approach, however, they are learned through a multi-sensory way using:
Arm Tapping:
the student will hold the red word card in his non writing hand, then use his writing hand to tap once for each letter down his arm. After that, he reads the word again while sliding his hand from his shoulder to his wrist. He does this 3 times.
Finger Sliding and finger tracing:
As you can see in the example, the student will lay the red word on a flat surface and trace the letters while spelling them at the same time, then he’ll make use of the finger sliding technique where he slides his pointer finger under the word while reading it at the same time. As always he follows the 3 times rule.
Writing:
we reached the big step, a student is asked to write the word, in red, on the white board. He is asked to read the letters aloud as he does so. After that, he reads the word and underlines it along the way.
A follow up involves asking the student to use the word in a sentence.
It may sound somehow confusing at first for you, whether you’re a teacher, a mom, or a dad, but it’s really simple once you try it a couple of times.
5.Taking care of reading words, sentences and then a text:
In this approach, the teacher will start teaching students how to read words first by asking them to identify vowel sounds, letters and other concepts when reading and learning new words.
After that, he/she will move on to sentences and ask the students to read small ones first, silently to themselves and then aloud with his/her help.
Finally, students are asked to read a short story. Pay attention that the reading passages in this approach are decodable and only contain sounds and concepts the students have learned.
Semantics and new vocabulary are learned through out reading this passage. It is preferable to ask the student to visualize, and use his/her prior knowledge.
6.Writing:
As you’ve noticed this is a step by step approach, students learn what is easy in order to move on to what is difficult.
In this step, the teacher says/writes a word, the student is asked to repeat it, and make use of the finger tapping as he/she says it aloud. Then, he/she’s finally asked to write it down and read it again.
The teacher’s lesson plan:
In the Orton-Gillingham approach it is most important for the teacher to be always ready and one step ahead, his/her plans should be well sorted out, in other words, they have to be:
- Multi-Sensory: I already elaborated this idea, but it wouldn’t harm to repeat. In short, students must be able to hear, see, and feel what they’re being teached.
- Repetitive: the teacher has to always go back for review, this helps with word recognition and reading fluency (the teacher may use the fluency drill activity).
- Prognostic: the teacher has to monitor his/her students’ performance progress.
- Sequential and structured: the lessons have to move from simple concepts to more complex ones, and they have to also be connected to students’ prior knowledge (what they have been previously taught).
- Cognitive and cumulative: making sure students understand the what, why, and how of the learning process. Along with making sure all skills are mastered.
How does it guarantee reading success?
The Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators (AOGPE) is a certifying body dedicated to the highest professional and ethical standards for the treatment of dyslexia. The approach they use is research-based. It focuses on:
- Phonological awareness: students should be able to distinguish and reproduce the fundamental sounds of language.
- Semantics: most slow readers arrive at the end of the text and have no idea what it is talking about, since they were more focused on trying to read accurately.
- Syllables: teaching all types of syllabus, closed, vowel-consonant-e, open, consonant-le, r-controlled and diphthongs.
- Syntax, Grammar, Morphology: how to order words, and build them.
Costs and Fees:
Today, there are only 13 schools, in the USA, that employ this approach such as The Bridge Accademy, New jersey, and Stephen Gaynor School, New York. But they don’t do it for free.
A tutor can charge anywhere between $80-$100 an hour. Because it takes approximately 60-100 hours of tutoring to go up one grade level, the total cost would be about $10,000.
Other Approaches
Lindamood–Bell: like Orton-Gillingham, it is also multi-sensory and breaks down learning to read into concrete skills. These skills include connecting letters to sounds and blending sounds into words. It is offered at private Lindamood–Bell Learning Centers, and is very costly.
The only difference is that it is rather expensive and is more interested in speech problems. The program doesn’t get into the comprehension and visualizing piece until well after the child has mastered the basics of sounds. It also serves a broader audience than just dyslexic children.
The Davis Method: it believes that dyslexia is not a problem but rather a talent, and it deals with children as if they have a mental gift. Only problem is that it basically ignores all modern research.
Conclusion:
It is fair to say that nowadays the Orton-Gillingham approach is the best approach there is for treating dyslexia, by helping students in sorting, recognizing, and organizing the raw materials of language for thinking and use.