Reading

An Introduction to the Orton Gillingham Approach.

-Suellen Concessio Fernandes

 Phonological
Fluency
Awareness

Decoding Comprehension

Components of reading
The Orton Gillingham Approach is used for persons with
learning difficulties in reading writing and spelling.

• Direct
• Explicit
• Multisensory
• Structured
• Sequential
• Diagnostic
• Prescriptive

Basic Features
• Barton Reading Program – only encoding/decoding, lay
person teaching.
• Wilson reading System (WRS) – mainly designed for
adolescents. Tapping
• Lindamood Bell program – one on one instruction
• Preventing Academic Failure – class level instruction,
more word attack strategies, includes sight words too,
reading comprehension is also addressed.
• Raising Robust Readers -

Reading /writing
programs based on OG
For the OG program to be effective PA is done as a pre –
requisite to reading.

• The ability to listen inside a word – Fitzpatrick

• Phonological Awareness refers to an understanding of the
sound structure of language—that is, that language is made up
of words, syllables, rhymes, and sounds (phonemes).
• This knowledge occurs initially in oral language; students do
not have to know how to name letters or their corresponding
sounds in order to demonstrate phonological awareness.

Phonological Awareness
Expected Phonological Awareness Skills

Given sufficient instruction, practice, and exposure to

many literacy activities, students should be able to
• Word level:
• recognize how many words are in a sentence
• Syllable level:
• segment and blend words of at least three syllables
• Rhyme level:
• understand the concept of rhyming
• recognize and generate rhyming words
• Sound level:
• isolate the beginning or ending sounds in words
• segment and blend sounds in a word
• change a sound in a word to make a new word in
familiar games and songs

Development of PA
• Listening and discriminating between similar and
different sounds
• Rhyming
• Alliteration
• Sentence segmentation
• Word Syllabication
• Onset and rime
• Phonemic Awareness – segmenting, blending, omission,
synthesis, manipulation

Phonological Awareness
All instruction is multisensorial, and multi modal – reading spelling and
writing at the same time.

• Starts with pure sounds at the letter stage (phonograms). Letters are
not taught in the traditional a-z manner but in a sequence that follows
linguistic development in children. (later other graphemes.)
• Blend sounds to read and spell words (/t/+/a/ + /n/)
• Red words – non phonetic words (the, a, said)
• Syllables, prefixes and suffixes
• Spelling rules
• punctuation
• Decodable text
• Application of comprehension strategies.

OG Approach in PAF
• Review - previously learnt material, or even material
that the student requires for the new skill.
• Introduction to new material – phonograms, sight words,
suffixes (later prefixes), Syllable types and syllable
division, Spelling rules.
• Spelling dictation
• Reading – lists, decodable text
• Reinforcement – independent additional practice.

Session in OG