Why the Orton‑Gillingham Approach Delivers Real Results in Structured Literacy
The Orton-Gillingham approach is a structured literacy method designed to help students who struggle with reading, writing, spelling, and comprehension. While it benefits all learners, it is especially effective for students with dyslexia, auditory processing challenges, speech and language difficulties, and other learning differences.
This evidence-based curriculum is widely used in one-on-one tutoring, small groups, and even mainstream classrooms, making it flexible for diverse learning environments.
In this guide, you’ll explore the origins of the Orton-Gillingham approach, how it’s taught, and practical ways to apply it in your teaching. If you’re interested in becoming an Orton-Gillingham instructor, pursuing training is a key step to effectively supporting students with learning differences.
What Is the Orton-Gillingham Method?
The Orton-Gillingham approach is a structured, multisensory method for teaching reading, spelling, and writing. It uses direct, explicit instruction to help learners understand how letters and sounds work together. Lessons are taught step by step, with skills building on one another, and are tailored to each student’s pace. This approach is widely used to support individuals with dyslexia and other reading challenges.
Quick facts:
Best for: Dyslexia and struggling readers who need structured, explicit instruction.
Age range: Children, teens, and adults at any stage of reading development.
Setting: Most effective in one-on-one tutoring or small-group instruction.
Focus: Builds strong skills in reading, spelling, and writing through multisensory, step-by-step lessons that adapt to each learner’s pace and needs.
Meet the Pioneers Behind Orton-Gillingham
Dr. Samuel Orton: The Visionary Neuropsychiatrist Who Shaped Literacy
The Orton-Gillingham approach owes its foundation to the groundbreaking work of Dr. Samuel Orton, a distinguished neuropsychiatrist whose research over a century ago laid the groundwork for our modern understanding of reading disabilities. Dr. Orton’s work is foundation of the Orton-Gillingham method, and he dedicated his career to studying children with language processing disorders, driven by an unwavering determination to help these students overcome their learning challenges.
Dr. Orton’s revolutionary insight was his recognition that reading difficulties were not a result of laziness or lack of intelligence, but rather stemmed from neurological differences in how the brain processes language. His research identified specific patterns in how struggling readers approached text, leading him to develop theories about brain lateralization and its impact on reading ability. This neurological perspective was groundbreaking for its time and provided the scientific foundation that would later support the development of specialized teaching methods.
Anna Gillingham: The Educator Who Revolutionized Reading Instruction
While Dr. Orton provided the theoretical framework, it was Anna Gillingham, an exceptional teacher and psychologist, who translated these theories into practical, classroom-ready strategies. Gillingham shared Dr. Orton’s passion for helping struggling students and became one of the first educators to systematically implement multisensory teaching strategies in her classroom.
Gillingham’s innovative approach involved engaging multiple sensory pathways simultaneously during instruction. She observed that when students could see, hear, and physically interact with learning materials, their comprehension and retention improved dramatically. Her meticulous documentation of teaching strategies and student responses created the practical framework that would become the orton gillingham method.
The Collaborative Legacy: How Orton and Gillingham Transformed Learning
The partnership between Dr. Orton and Anna Gillingham represented a perfect union of scientific theory and educational practice. Together, they developed a systematic approach that addressed the specific needs of struggling readers while maintaining rigorous academic standards. Their collaborative work has had a lasting impact on literacy education, influencing countless educators and helping millions of students achieve reading success.
How Does the Orton-Gillingham Approach Work?
The Orton-Gillingham approach works by teaching reading skills in a structured, sequential way using multisensory techniques. Instructors explicitly teach sound–letter relationships and reinforce them through seeing, hearing, and hands-on practice. A typical lesson might include reviewing sounds, practicing spelling patterns with letter tiles, reading controlled text, and strengthening understanding through guided writing activities.
The 6 Core Principles of the Orton-Gillingham Approach
Every Orton-Gillingham lesson follows a consistent, predictable structure organized around proven strategies, activities, and patterns. This structured approach provides students with a sense of security and confidence, as they always know what to expect throughout each lesson. The predictability reduces anxiety and allows students to focus their cognitive resources on learning rather than trying to navigate unfamiliar lesson formats.
The structured nature of the lessons also supports teachers by providing a reliable framework for instruction. This consistency enables educators to track student progress more effectively and make informed decisions about pacing and content delivery. The structure includes specific time allocations for different activities, ensuring that all essential components receive adequate attention in every session.
The sequential principle of the Orton-Gillingham approach ensures that each skill is taught in a logical, developmental order. Students begin with the most fundamental concepts, such as simple consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) patterns, and gradually progress to more sophisticated elements including complex vowel patterns, multisyllabic words, spelling rules, affixes, and morphemes.
This carefully planned sequence prevents the formation of learning gaps that can derail a student’s progress. By building skills systematically from the ground up, students develop a solid foundation that supports more advanced learning. The sequential approach also allows teachers to identify exactly where a student may be struggling and address specific skill deficits before moving forward.
You can see a sample Scope and Sequence >HERE<
Each Orton-Gillingham lesson builds directly upon previous learning, creating a cumulative knowledge base that grows stronger over time. Students are not permitted to advance to new skills until they have demonstrated mastery of current concepts. This mastery-based approach ensures that learning is thorough and lasting rather than superficial.
The cumulative aspect also involves continuous review of previously learned material. As students acquire new skills, they regularly revisit and practice earlier concepts until they become automatic. This spiral review process helps transfer information from working memory to long-term memory, making reading skills more fluent and effortless.
In the Orton-Gillingham method, the teacher takes center stage as the primary source of instruction. Rather than expecting students to discover reading patterns independently, teachers explicitly teach exactly what students need to know. This direct instruction approach leaves nothing to chance and ensures that all students receive clear, unambiguous information about how language works.
Explicit instruction includes modeling correct responses, providing clear explanations of rules and patterns, and offering abundant opportunities for guided practice. Teachers never assume that students possess prerequisite knowledge and instead systematically teach every component skill. This thoroughness is particularly important for students with learning differences who may not naturally infer language patterns.
The multisensory principle is perhaps the most distinctive feature of the Orton-Gillingham approach. Teachers systematically engage students’ auditory, visual, and tactile sensory pathways during instruction, creating multiple neural connections that support learning and retention.
For example, when learning the vowel sound ‘a’, a student might visually examine a picture of an apple, listen carefully to the isolated sound while closing their eyes, and then trace the letter in the air while speaking the sound aloud. This combination of seeing, hearing, and moving creates a rich, multi-dimensional learning experience that accommodates different learning styles and strengthens memory formation.
The multisensory approach is particularly beneficial for students with dyslexia, who often have stronger abilities in some sensory modalities than others. By engaging multiple pathways simultaneously, the instruction compensates for weaker areas while building on strengths.
The Orton-Gillingham approach uses systematic phonics instruction, starting with fundamental alphabetic principles and advancing to more complex concepts. Students learn the predictable relationship between sounds (phonemes) and letters (graphemes).
This systematic approach to phonics differs from incidental or embedded phonics instruction by following a predetermined sequence that ensures all essential sound-symbol relationships are taught explicitly. Students learn not only individual letter sounds but also how these sounds combine to form syllables and words, providing them with powerful decoding strategies for unfamiliar text.
The strength of Orton-Gillingham phonics lies in its explicit instruction model. Unlike programs that expect children to discover reading patterns independently, an Orton-Gillingham curriculum directly teaches each phonics rule and provides extensive practice before moving forward. This makes it particularly effective as a dyslexia reading program, where students need clear, systematic instruction to build neural pathways for reading.
See an Orton-Gillingham Lesson in Action!
A Sample Lesson Plan Outline:
- Visual drill (phonogram cards)
- Auditory drill (dictate phonograms)
- Sound blending (reading words)
- Review previously taught skills
- Introduce a new phonogram/concept/rule/syllable instruction
- Spelling work
- Sentence work
- Oral reading with decodable and controlled text
Using the set scope and sequence, the instructor will plan the next lesson based on how the student performed in the current lesson.
Whether you’re implementing an Orton-Gillingham reading program at home or in the classroom, understanding the lesson structure is key. The PRIDE Reading Program follows this systematic format, ensuring consistency and building student confidence through predictable routines.
Here is a sample Orton-Gillingham lesson for you to view. Keep in mind it is only a very short section to give you an idea, it is not the entire lesson.
For more information on what happens step-by-step in an Orton-Gillingham lesson with pictures and examples, please feel free to read my previous posts titled:
An Orton-Gillingham Curriculum For Your Students
