I use the Orton Gillingham approach, based on the teachings of Dr. Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham. Students are taught using a multisensory, phonetic, sequential, logic-based, and individualized method.

1) Learning must be multisensory. Students must not only see the word, but must hear the word and have both the kinesthetic sensation of the hand and arm muscles writing the word, as well as the tactile sensation of the way in which the sounds of the word are formed in the mouth. This must all be done simultaneously.

2) It must be cumulative. Each concept being taught must be broken down to its smallest component and presented to the student in isolation from all other information.

3) The student must practice this one small part until it is known to the point of automaticity. Then and only then, another small component may be added. Under no circumstances may the teacher introduce more than one concept at a time or move on before the student has mastered the first step.

4) Because so much repetition is needed for the student to arrive at this point of automaticity, to prevent any tendency for the student to become bored, the teacher must be exceedingly imaginative and the program must be individualized to the student’s own interests and pace of learning.

5) The work is phonetic. This is not to be confused with what is commonly known as ‘phonics’. Rather it is a truly phonetically based understanding of the entire English language.

There are only 44 sounds in the English language, yet these 44 sounds can be written in over 100 ways. The student must be directly taught each one, first in isolation and then in combination with others previously mastered. Then, and only then, will the student own the information and be able to use it effortlessly and with confidence.

6) It is rule-based. Despite popular belief, the English language is surprisingly regular once an individual has the knowledge and training to recognize how the components of words interact with one another to form unique, yet completely understandable wholes.

The student does not have to rely on visual recall, which is often faulty, but rather can use reasoning and logic when deciding which of several possible constructions to use in a given word. Through learning to recognize the six different syllable types and using them as a guide to pronunciation, reading will gradually become fluent and effortless.

7) Comprehension, being more a function of experience and background rather than rote learning, cannot be directly taught. In order to “teach” comprehension, we must look ahead and determine what our student will need to understand at some future point, say in a year’s time.

Then we must teach the prefixes, suffixes, and roots of English so the student can see how their presence alters not just the appearance and sound of the word but equally importantly, its meaning.

AN OVERVIEW OF THE INFORMATION PROCESSING

The eye picks up the message from the printed page, for example, “cat.” The message travels through the brain, passing thousands of neurological connections and eventually results in the word “cat” being processed in the mouth.

The brain is full of these neurological connections. In order for the message to be received accurately, it must touch base with each one of them. If it misses just one connection, the word will not be received as “cat", but may instead be “act”, or “tac,” or may, in fact, be missed altogether.

This is the reason that the child may read a word accurately at one point on a page, yet in the very next paragraph, or sometimes on the very next line, not recognize the same word.

The task then, of the teacher of a learning-disabled student, is to strengthen these neurological pathways so that the message never misfires. This is what the Orton-Gillingham method, or multisensory language education is designed to do. Properly implemented, success is guaranteed.