For whom is the Orton-Gillingham appropriate?
The Orton-Gillingham Approach is appropriate for teaching individuals, small groups, and classrooms. It is appropriate for teaching the primary, secondary and college levels as well as adults. The explicit focus of the approach has been and continues to be upon persons with the kinds of language processing problems associated with dyslexia. Early intervention is highly desirable but it is never too late to start!
To quote Margaret Byrd Rawson, a former President of The Orton Dyslexia Society (the precursor to The International Dyslexia Association): "Dyslexic students need a different approach to learning language from that employed in most classrooms. They need to be taught, slowly and thoroughly, the basic elements of their language -- the sounds and the letters which represent them -- and how to put these together and take them apart. They have to have lots of practice in having their writing hands, eyes, ears, and voices working together for the conscious organization and retention of their learning."
When taught by the Orton-Gillingham Approach, students have the advantage of learning alphabetic patterns and words by utilizing all three pathways. Orton suggested that teaching the "fundamentals of phonic association with letter forms both visually presented and reproduced in writing, until the correct associations were built up" would benefit students of all ages. |
