What Is Orton-Gillingham?

If you’ve spent any time researching dyslexia intervention, you’ve almost certainly come across the term Orton-Gillingham. Here’s what it actually is, and why it’s the foundation of our program.

Where it comes from

The Orton-Gillingham method was created in the 1930s by Dr. Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham, pioneers in early dyslexia research. Based on their observations of struggling readers, they developed a program for teaching remedial reading that still shapes how dyslexia is treated today.

How it’s structured

Orton-Gillingham uses systematic phonics to teach language and build mastery in students with dyslexia. It centers on the sound-symbol relationship: the connection every reader needs to understand the alphabetic writing system. Phonics and phonemic awareness give learners the ability to identify the individual sounds that combine to make words.

It’s also multisensory: lessons draw on sight, hearing, and touch together, helping learners forge stronger associations than any single sense could build alone. And it’s sequential: each lesson intentionally builds on the last, so a learner masters the basics before moving on to material that depends on them.

A typical Orton-Gillingham lesson has five components:

1. Introduction of new skills: a short tutorial and warm-up practice.
2. Application of those skills: putting the new skill to use right after the warm-up.
3. Syllabication for decoding multi-syllable words: starting at individual letters and building up through letter combinations.
4. Red (sight) words: high-frequency words that don’t follow normal spelling or pronunciation patterns, and need to become instantly recognizable.
5. Oral reading: reading passages and answering comprehension questions to put it all together.

Does it work?

While Orton-Gillingham was designed for dyslexic learners, breaking language and reading down into distinct, sequential skills tends to benefit any struggling reader. Decades of research back up Orton and Gillingham’s original assumptions about how reading is learned. The method has helped thousands upon thousands of people become fluent readers.

It’s why Orton-Gillingham is the backbone of our program at Online Reading Tutor.

Take our free 10-minute screener to see how a structured, Orton-Gillingham-based plan could help your learner.