Teaching reading in an inncer city school through a multisensory teaching approach

Annals of Dyslexia, 2002 by Joshi, R Malatesha, Dahlgren, Mary, Boulware-Gooden, Regina

The purpose of the present study was to examine the efficacy of the multisensory teaching approach to improve reading skills at the first-- grade level. The control group was taught by the Houghton-Mifflin Basal Reading Program while the treatment group was taught by the Language Basics: Elementary, which incorporates the Orton-- Gillingham-based Alphabetic Phonics Method. The results showed that the treatment group made statistically significant gains in phonological awareness, decoding, and reading comprehension while the control group made gains only on reading comprehension.

Nearly 15 to 20% of elementary school children experience difficulty in mastering the literacy skills of reading and spelling (Lyon, Gray, Kavanagh, & Krasnegor, 1993; Stedman & Kaestle, 1987). Several reasons have been advanced to explain reading difficulties experienced by some children. These include family background, paucity of literacy materials available at home, lack of motivation on the part of the learner, and some unspecified cognitive weakness. To this list of factors should also be added the quality of beginning reading instruction provided in many schools. Carroll, as early as 1963, noted that a high percentage of school children fail to acquire literacy skills when the classroom instruction is ineffective or insufficient. Calfee (1983) suggested that the majority of reading-disabled children "represent an instructional dysfunction rather than a constitutional disability" (p. 77). Poor instruction has a more direct impact on reading performance of children in early elementary grades than in later years. Furthermore, poor performance in early grades tends to persist as children advance through the educational system. Juel (1988), for instance, followed a number of poor readers from first grade through fourth grade, and found that children who read poorly at the end of the first grade remained poor readers at the end of fourth grade. Corroborating this conclusion is the finding by Strag (1972) that when a diagnosis of dyslexia was made in the first two grades and treated, nearly 82% of the students could be brought up to their normal classroom work; whereas only 46% of the dyslexic problems identified and treated in the third grade were remediated. This number falls off sharply to 10 to 15% when treatment is provided in grades five to seven. According to Torgesen (2000), it takes more than two hours of intensive intervention per day for a year to remediate a child at the sixth or seventh grade level. It follows, then, that poor readers need more intensive high-quality remedial instruction in early elementary grades than in later grades. When an intensive structured reading program was adopted at the early grade levels, there was a significant improvement in children's reading ability Schenck, Fitzsimmons, Bullard, Taylor, and Satz (1980) found a significant improvement in academic development of high-risk children who received kindergarten interventions. Similarly, Blachman and her colleagues (Ball & Blachman, 1991; Blachman, 1987, 1997; Blachman, Ball, Black, & Tangel, 1994) and Foorman and her colleagues (Foorman, Francis, Fletcher, Schatschneider, & Mehta, 1998; Foorman, Francis, Novy, & Liberman, 1991) have showed that early intervention programs were been highly effective.

A number of studies have demonstrated that systematic, explicit, decoding instruction that emphasized synthetic phonics yielded better results than other instructional methods (Auckerman, 1984; National Reading Panel, 2000; Rayner, Foorman, Perfetti, Pesetsky, & Seidenberg, 2001, 2002; Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998; Torgesen, Wagner, & Rashotte, 1997; Torgesen, et al., 2001; Vellutino, 1991). A remedial instruction that has deep historical roots and is being widely used is the Orton-Gillingham Approach (OG hereafter). In clinical studies, this approach has proven to be very effective in improving reading and spelling among children with literacy problems (cf., McIntyre & Pickering, 1995).

Even though the principles of the OG have been in use since the 1930s, Anna Gillingham, a close associate of Samuel Orton, and Bessie Stillman are credited with publishing the principles of this approach only in the 1960s (Gillingham & Stillman, 1997). The most important feature of the OG is that it is a structured program that deliberately tries to establish a link between the printed language and the phonetic elements it represents. The ultimate goal of any instructional procedure is to develop reading comprehension, and the OG purports reading comprehension will emerge once decoding skills and vocabulary knowledge are well developed. Poor word recognition skills can act as a bottleneck and impede comprehension, causing the reader to spend an inordinate amount of time and energy decoding a word and losing the meaning of the passage.

The OG is a multisensory method of teaching language-- related skills that focuses on the use of sounds, syllables, words, sentences, and written discourse. Instruction is explicit, systematic, cumulative, direct, and sequential. Ansara (1982) summed up the OG this way: