I use the Orton Gillingham approach, from the teachings of Dr. Samuel Orton and Gillingham. Students are taught using a multi-sensory, phonetic, sequential, logic based amd individualized method.

1) Learning must be multi-sensory. Our Students must not only see the word, but must hear the word and have both kinesthetic sensation of the hand and arm muscles writig the word and 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 culmative. Each concept being tuaght 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 he knows it to the point of automaticiy . Then and only then, anohter 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, in order to head off nay tedency for the student to become bored, the teacher must be exceedingly imaginative and the program mucy be individualized to the studnts own iterests 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 true phonetically based understanding of the entire English language.

There are only 44 sounds in the Englisj language, yet these 44 sounds can be written in over 100 ways. The student muc be directly taught each one, first in isolation and then in combination with others previously mastered. Then, and only then, will the studnet 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 trainig to recognize how the individual has the knowledge and training to recognize how the individual composnents of words interact with aone anohter to form a unique, yet completely understandable wholes. The student does not have to rely on visual recall, which is often faulty, but rather can use reasonig and logic when deciding which of several possible construsctions to use in a given word. Throug learning to recognize the six different syllable types and using them as a guide to pronunciation, his 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 understabd 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 messge 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 brian is full of these neurological connections. In order forthe message to be received accurately, it must touch base with each one of them. If it misses just one connection, the owrd will not be received as “cat”, but may instaed be “act”, or “tac” or may i 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 learnig disabled studnet, is to strengthen these neurological pathways so that the message never misfires. This is what the Orton-Gillingham method, or multi-sensory language education is designed to do. Properly implemented, success is guaranteed.