The Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators developed the Orton-Gillingham Approach which is an instructional approach intended primarily for use with persons who have difficulty with reading, spelling, and writing of the sort associated with dyslexia.
The Orton-Gillingham Approach is focused upon the learning needs of the individual child. Children with dyslexia need to master the same basic knowledge about language and its relationship to our writing system as any who seek to become competent readers and writers. However, because of their dyslexia, they need more help than most people in sorting, recognizing, and organizing the raw materials of language for thinking and use. Language elements that non-dyslexic learners acquire easily must be taught directly and systematically.
The Orton-Gillingham Approach has been rightfully described as language-based, multisensory, structured, sequential, cumulative, cognitive, and flexible. The attributes of this approach include the following:
- Linguistic competence by stressing language patterns that determine word order and sentence structure as well as the meaning of words and phrases.
- Multisensory teaching by using all the leaning pathways: seeing, hearing, feeling, and awareness of motion.
- Information is presented in an ordered and structured way that indicates the relationship between the material taught and past material taught.
- Step by step leaners move from the simple, well-learned material to that which is more and more complex using a sequential, incremental, and cumulative approach.
- From a cognitive approach, students gain confidence as they improve in their ability to apply newly gained knowledge about and knowledge how to develop their skills with reading, spelling, and writing.
- The teacher presentations employ lesson formats which ensure that the student approaches the learning experience understanding what is to be learned, why it is to be learned, and how it is to be learned.
The basic purpose of everything that is done in the Orton-Gillingham Approach is assisting the student to become a competent reader, writer and independent learner.
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