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

Although the first emphasis in the Orton-Gillingham Approach is to ensure decoding with visual accuracy, correct phonological association and facile performance, decoding encompasses a progression from graphemes to syllables to multisyllabic words with roots and affixes, along with their meanings, so that the structure of the English language is made explicit. Sufficient practice in both reading and writing is provided so that one reinforces the other while moving toward the goal of automatic decoding (p. 421).

Since the 1960s, several versions of the OG have been developed. A closely related approach is the multisensory approach developed by Beth Slingerland to remediate students with specific language disorder (Slingerland, 1977). Another co-- worker of Samuel Orton, Romalda Spalding, developed a program called the Writing Road to Reading or the unified phonics method (Spalding & Spalding, 1990). Even though much of the material is borrowed from the OG, the Spalding method differs from it in two important respects: emphasis on letter sounds rather than letter names, and emphasis on spelling through writing.

Other programs derived from the OG are Alphabetic Phonics (Cox, 1992), the Herman Approach (Herman, 1993), Project Read (Enfield, 1987), and the Wilson Approach (Wilson, 1988, 2000). These approaches share the same philosophy-namely the importance of word recognition skills for reading-and can be grouped under the umbrella term of multisensory instruction. These instructional procedures are systematic, sequential, explicit, and direct in imparting instruction and utilize visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and tactile senses for teaching reading.

Even though the OG was first published in 1960, its principles were used in classroom settings several years earlier. One of the earliest studies conducted that incorporated the OG principles was by Monroe (1932). Three groups of participants from different grade levels were involved in this study. Eighty-nine subjects received individual instruction based on the OG. The second group of 50 subjects received OG instruction in their classrooms by teachers trained in its principles, and the third group of 50 subjects served as a control group and received instruction that was used in the classroom. The instruction for all three groups lasted for about seven months. As expected, the first group that received the OG on an individual basis showed the most gain: 1.4 years for the seven-month period compared to three months gained by the control group. The second group that received the OG in classrooms showed a gain of eight months. Another study (Kline & Kline, 1978) reported that of the 92 dyslexic subjects taught through the OG, only 4.4% failed to show improvement.

Although not labeled as an OG, one study that has compared several reading instructional programs is one by Foorman, Francis, Shaywitz, Shaywitz, and Fletcher (1997). The study compared the effects of the three types of instruction in eight elementary schools in Houston. The three types of instruction were whole-language instruction, embedded phonics, and direct-code instruction. In whole-language instruction, the emphasis was on connected text with alphabetic learning assumed to go on implicitly. In embedded phonics instruction, sound-spelling patterns were stressed by using connected text. In direct-code instruction, letter-sound correspondences were taught and practiced with various kinds of text, writing, and language games. The study found that the children from direct-code instruction improved in word reading at a faster rate and had higher word-recognition skills than children from whole-language instruction.