Structured, sequential, multisensory teaching: The Orton legacy

Annals of Dyslexia, 1998 by Henry, Marcia K

This manuscript is based on The Samuel Torrey Orton and June Lyday Orton Memorial Lecture, presented by Marcia K. Henry at the 48th Annual Conference of the International Dyslexia Association. The paper provides a selective biography of Samuel T. Orton, discusses his educational ideas and how they came to be, and considers how current educational research validates much of Orton's early thinking.

I think it is extremely important, as The Orton Dyslexia Society, founded in memory of Samuel T. Orton, holds its 48th annual conference with its new name, The International Dyslexia Association (IDA), that we reflect on just who Samuel Orton was, what his educational ideas were, and how current educational research validates much of Orton's early thinking.

Samuel Orton was foremost a scientist. Most of his writing deals with the neurobiological concepts and theories surrounding dyslexia. In this paper, however, I concentrate on the educational aspects of Orton's work. Let me first mention that for many years there has been criticism of Orton's theory and practice, primarily because there was so little research carefully documenting his instruction and its consequences. In Minneapolis in 1978, during the 29th annual ODS conference, I was part of a panel that included Bob Nash of the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, Aylett Cox of Dallas, Lucia Karnes of Winston-Salem, and Maynard Reynolds of the University of Minnesota. The rest of us extolled the virtues of the Orton-Gillingham approach from our clinical experiences, but Dr. Reynolds reminded us, forcefully, that "anecdotal evidence is easily dismissed." He kept asking us where the scientific studies were that might verify our claims. His concern was shared by Dr. Carl Kline, whose 1977 paper in The Bulletin of The Orton Society was titled "Orton-Gillingham Methodology: Where Have All of the Researchers Gone?"

In this paper I hope to present evidence that supports the efficacy of instructional approaches derived from Orton's pioneering work. But, I first digress to introduce you to Samuel Torrey Orton: the scientist, the physician, the educator, the man.

A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Orton was a pathologist, neuropathologist, neurologist, and psychiatrist. He was born October 15,1879, in Columbus, Ohio, where his father, a geology professor, later presided as the first president of Ohio State University. Sam went to elementary school in Columbus, and later graduated from the Taft School in Watertown, Connecticut.

Orton received a B.S. degree from Ohio State and an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, followed by an M.A. in Education from Harvard. In the early 1900s, he served as a pathologist in Massachusetts, Ohio, and Montana, and held teaching positions in neuropathology at Harvard and in neurology at Clark University. A highlight of his career was studying with Dr. Alois Alzheimer in Breslau, Germany. He returned to the United States to become Pathology and Clinical Director of the Pennsylvania Hospital for Mental Diseases.

In 1917, while still at the hospital, Orton read Hinshelwood's manuscript on "Congenital Word Blindness" and was intrigued by the discussion of reading problems in bright children. His interest in this paper was a first step toward his work with children having, what Orton later called, "strephosymbolia." This most apt term was formed from the Greek roots meaning "twisted" and "symbols" and describes the types of errors frequently made in reading and writing by the children to whom it applies.

In 1919 Orton was urged to come to Iowa to build and direct a psychopathic hospital system for the state and head the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa Medical School. The laboratory unit where he spent so much of his time was later dedicated in his name.

Through a Rockefeller Foundation grant, Orton set up the first mobile health unit in the state of Iowa, and it was through this project in Greene County that he met MP. MP was aged 16 years, 2 months with a mental age of 11 years, 4 months, and an IQ of 71. Orton noted the following in his meeting with MP following the psychological testing: ". . . I was strongly impressed with the feeling that this estimate did not do justice to the boy's mental equipment, and that the low rating was to be explained by the fact that the test is inadequate to gage [sic] the equipment in a case of such a special disability. Further, it was easily seen that while he was unable to recall the visual impressions of words clearly enough to recognize them in print, he did make facile use of visual imagery of objects of rather complex type. I asked him, for example, questions concerning the adjustment of bearings in the V type automobile engine which required a good visualizing power for answer, and his replies were prompt and keen" (Orton 1925, p. 584).

Orton was fascinated that while MP could read only at a primary grade level, his copying was nearly perfect (see figure 1). Orton concluded that MP's ". . . visual equipment was adequate to receive correct impressions of the stimuli and to translate them into one form of motion copying" (1925, p. 592). Clearly, this was not a visual defect. In contrast to his facility with copying, MP took over six minutes to read a similar passage consisting of 60 words in three sentences, and he made many errors. His errors in writing from dictation were also numerous (see figure 2). Orton suggested that MP had faulty sound association. Although he knew alphabet letters by name, "there was striking lack of association of certain letter sounds with the corresponding letter form"(1925, p. 589).