What is the Orton-Gillingham approach?

The Orton-Gillingham approach is a structured, multisensory method for teaching reading and spelling, designed for people whose brains do not acquire these skills automatically. Developed in the 1930s, it is the original approach within what is now called structured literacy. Many current dyslexia programs, including Sounds in Syllables, are built on its principles. Knowing what those principles are gives a parent or educator something concrete to ask about when looking for help.

What is the Orton-Gillingham approach?

The Orton-Gillingham approach is a set of teaching principles for language instruction. It is not a single script or program, but a defined method built on a set of core principles. It teaches the structure of language directly and in a specific order, one skill at a time, using sight, sound, and movement together. It adjusts constantly to what each student has and has not yet mastered.

The Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators (AOGPE) sets and maintains professional standards for the approach.

At a Glance
Origin	Developed in the 1930s by neuropsychiatrist Samuel Orton and educator Anna Gillingham
Who it is for	People with dyslexia or other phonological processing difficulties. Used from about age 6 through adulthood
How it is delivered	One-to-one sessions, at a frequency the program specifies. Instruction follows the student’s current skill level rather than their grade
Core structure	Explicit, systematic, diagnostic, and multisensory teaching, with phonics in both directions
Relationship to other programs	Orton-Gillingham is an approach. Sounds in Syllables, Wilson, and others are specific programs built on it

What are the core principles, and what does each one actually mean?

The approach is usually described through several principles. Five of them do the most to explain what sets it apart. Each addresses something a struggling reader needs made explicit rather than inferred, and together they form a coherent system.

• Explicit instruction: Nothing is left to discovery or inference. The teacher names the concept, demonstrates it, and guides the student through it, including the underlying rule or pattern. A child is not asked to figure out why “ph” makes the /f/ sound. It is explained, practiced, and revisited until it is solid. This matters because, as the IDA describes it, structured literacy does not assume students will deduce these concepts on their own. The pattern has to be taught directly.
• Systematic and cumulative sequencing: The curriculum is arranged in a deliberate order, from the simplest sounds and patterns to the most complex. Each new concept builds only on what has already been mastered. A student does not move on to blending consonant clusters until single consonant-vowel-consonant words are automatic. The sequence is set by what the student has secured, not by the calendar.
• Diagnostic and prescriptive teaching: The teacher reads the student’s performance in every session and adjusts. A lesson is not a script to deliver on schedule. If a student shows a gap in a skill introduced two months ago, the teacher returns to it. If a concept is solid in two sessions rather than five, the teacher moves on. The teaching follows the learner.
• Multisensory engagement: Every concept is taught through sight, hearing, and movement at the same time. Anna Gillingham called this the language triangle: auditory, visual, and kinesthetic pathways working together. A student sees the letter, says its sound, hears it, and writes or traces it, all at once. The rationale is not that multisensory practice is more fun. It is that a student who cannot yet retrieve a sound from print alone has other routes to it.
• Synthetic and analytic phonics together: The student works in both directions. Synthetic phonics goes from part to whole: the student sees individual sounds and blends them into a word. Analytic phonics goes from whole to part: the student takes a known word and pulls apart its sound structure. Both directions develop phonological awareness, which is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate the individual sounds in words. Phonological awareness is the core skill that dyslexia most often affects.

The Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators describes the approach through a longer list of principles than these five. Among the others: instruction is individualized to each learner, cognitive (the student comes to understand the reasons behind what they are learning, not only the pattern), and emotionally sound (structured so the student meets with regular, genuine success). The five above are the ones that most shape how a lesson actually looks.

The approach changes how instruction is delivered, breaking language into its smallest parts, naming them directly, and building them back up one solid step at a time.

Teaching a rule directly does something easy to overlook. It gives a child a procedure to reach for instead of a guess, and it presents reading as a skill with a structure rather than something other people can simply do.

Where did the Orton-Gillingham approach come from?

The approach grew out of a collaboration between two people whose work, taken together, covers both the neuroscience and the practical classroom side of reading difficulty.

Samuel Torrey Orton (1879 to 1948) was a neuropsychiatrist and pathologist who, as early as the 1920s, had studied children with the kind of language processing difficulties now associated with dyslexia. He brought together neuroscientific understanding of how the brain processes language with specific principles for teaching children who struggled. His book, Reading, Writing, and Speech Problems in Children, was among the first to treat all aspects of language as related and to move away from “remedial reading” as the organizing concept.

Anna Gillingham (1878 to 1963) was an educator and psychologist with, in the words of the Academy, “a superb mastery of the language.” Working with educator Bessie Stillman, she developed the language triangle concept: the idea that auditory, visual, and kinesthetic pathways must be engaged together. She organized the steps of language teaching into a deliberate sequence, beginning with the simplest sounds in isolation and building to syllables, words, phrases, and sentences. She also developed the system of rules and generalizations that gives the approach its cognitive depth, and compiled everything in the Gillingham Manual, which the Academy still describes as its most important text.

The hyphen in Orton-Gillingham is, as the Academy notes, important. It represents the union of two distinct contributions: the neurological theory and the practical instructional architecture.

Why does multisensory teaching help a child who struggles with reading?

Reading is not a natural human skill. Spoken language is, but written language requires the brain to build an artificial bridge between symbols on a page and the sounds of speech. For many readers, that bridge forms with typical classroom instruction. For people with dyslexia, it does not, and the IDA describes difficulties in phonological processing as a common reason.

When a child sees the letter “b” and also says the sound /b/ aloud and also writes or traces the letter at the same moment, the same piece of information is reaching him through sight, sound, and movement together. Where visual recall alone is not enough, sound and movement give the same information a second and third way in.

That is the rationale the Academy gives for the multisensory principle.

What does an Orton-Gillingham lesson actually look like?

A session is structured, but not rigid. The order of activities is deliberate and consistent, giving the student a stable frame so they can focus on the content rather than on orienting to a new format each time.

1. Review of known sounds. Flash cards with a letter or letter combination on one side and the sound on the other are practiced in both directions: the student sees the letter and gives the sound, then hears the sound and writes the letter.
2. Introduction of new content. A new concept is named, explained, demonstrated, and connected to what the student already knows. Nothing is presented without an explanation of the underlying rule or pattern.
3. Blending practice. The student takes individual sounds and combines them into words, moving from part to whole. Every word used is made up of patterns already taught.
4. Reading decodable text. The student reads words and short passages that include only patterns already mastered.
5. Spelling practice. The student hears a word, segments it into individual sounds, identifies the spelling pattern for each sound, and writes it. This analytic direction (from whole word back to its parts) develops phonological awareness that reading alone does not always build.
6. Syllable work. Syllable types are taught and practiced throughout. English has six syllable types, and Orton-Gillingham teaches them explicitly, in order. A reader who understands syllable patterns can decode words that are too long to memorize as whole units.

At Lantern, this lesson structure is delivered through Sounds in Syllables. More on that below.

Is Orton-Gillingham evidence-based?

This question deserves a careful answer, because “evidence-based” is used in two different ways in education.

The principles at the core of the Orton-Gillingham approach (explicit instruction, systematic and cumulative phonics, phonological awareness, and decoding) are the same ones the International Dyslexia Association builds its definition of structured literacy on: “a strong core of highly explicit, systematic teaching of foundation skills such as decoding and spelling skills.” Decades of research support this kind of instruction for students with dyslexia and related reading difficulties.

The picture is more complicated for branded programs that carry the Orton-Gillingham name or principles. Because “Orton-Gillingham” describes an approach, not a single program, studies vary by the specific program tested, the population studied, and the intensity of instruction. A practitioner trained in the approach has flexibility in how they apply the principles, which makes it harder to study as a single unit than a fully scripted curriculum. The IDA’s position is that the underlying principles of structured literacy are well-supported. The evidence for any specific program should be evaluated on that program’s own research.

For a parent making sense of this: look for instruction that is explicit, systematic, phonics-based, and tied to a program with defined training standards. The Orton-Gillingham framework, and programs built on it, fit that description.

How is Orton-Gillingham different from structured literacy and from a specific program like Sounds in Syllables?

These three terms are related but not interchangeable. The table below shows how they fit together.

Term	What it is	Scope
Structured literacy	An umbrella term defined by the IDA for all reading instruction that is explicit, systematic, and addresses phonology, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension in an integrated way	Broadest: covers many programs and approaches
Orton-Gillingham approach	The original method within structured literacy, defined by a set of core principles, with professional standards set by the Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators	A defined approach, not a single program
Sounds in Syllables (SIS)	A specific Orton-Gillingham program developed by Sandra Dillon over more than two decades, now administered by ASDEC, delivered by practitioners trained through its accredited training center, with the Certified Academic Language Therapist (CALT) credential as the endpoint of that pathway	Narrowest: a specific curriculum with specific training requirements

Every Sounds in Syllables session is Orton-Gillingham. Every Orton-Gillingham session is structured literacy. But not all structured literacy instruction is Orton-Gillingham, and not all Orton-Gillingham instruction is Sounds in Syllables. The distinctions matter when you are evaluating a program or a practitioner’s training. For more, see the companion article on what Sounds in Syllables is and how it works.

Who is Orton-Gillingham for, and at what ages?

The approach was designed for people for whom reading does not come automatically. Most often that means dyslexia, which the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity notes affects as many as 20 percent of the population.

Orton-Gillingham is used across a wide age range. It is most often associated with elementary-age children, typically from about age 6 or 7 onward, but the approach is used with older students and adults as well. There is no age at which structured literacy instruction stops being relevant for someone who has not yet built solid decoding skills. The sequence simply starts at whatever point the student’s current skills actually are, not where their grade level suggests they should be.

If you are wondering whether your child is struggling with something that calls for structured literacy instruction, the article on whether a child is dyslexic or just a slow reader lays out what to look for. If you are comparing different types of support, tutoring versus structured literacy intervention explains how they differ in purpose and method.

What does training in the Orton-Gillingham approach involve?

The Orton-Gillingham approach is not a workbook or a curriculum a teacher picks up and follows. It requires the practitioner to read the student in real time, identify gaps accurately, select the right point in the sequence to address them, and deliver multisensory practice with precision. That kind of diagnostic teaching is a trained skill.

The Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators offers a certification path with multiple levels, from Classroom Educator through Associate, Certified, and Fellow, each requiring defined coursework and a supervised practicum. Programs built on the approach, like Sounds in Syllables, have their own intensive training requirements and are delivered by practitioners trained through that program, including those completing supervised practicum hours under a certified therapist. A practitioner’s credential is a meaningful signal about the depth of their preparation, not just their familiarity with the general ideas.

When evaluating a provider, ask what specific training they completed, through which program, and what their supervised practicum involved. The article on how to choose a dyslexia tutor in the Triangle goes through this in more detail.

How Lantern uses the Orton-Gillingham approach

At Lantern, the Orton-Gillingham approach is the foundation of every session. The method Lantern delivers is Sounds in Syllables, an Orton-Gillingham program with a specific sequence, specific training requirements, and a structured approach to diagnostic teaching. Sessions run three times a week, closely enough spaced that each session picks up where the last one left off.

For how the principles above translate into a weekly plan for one child, see Lantern’s approach. For the materials, lesson structure, and pacing, see the article on Sounds in Syllables. For school teams weighing how outside intervention sits alongside classroom instruction, the page for schools covers how that coordination works. If you are ready to ask whether Lantern suits your child, the contact page is where to begin.

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Sources

• Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators, “Who Were Orton and Gillingham?” Source for biographical details on Samuel Orton (1879 to 1948) and Anna Gillingham (1878 to 1963), the language triangle concept, and the Gillingham Manual.
• Academy of Orton-Gillingham Practitioners and Educators, Homepage Source for the AOGPE’s role in setting professional standards for the approach and its certification levels.
• International Dyslexia Association, “Structured Literacy Works, But What Is It?” Source for IDA’s definition of structured literacy as “highly explicit, systematic teaching of foundation skills such as decoding and spelling skills.”
• International Dyslexia Association, Definition of Dyslexia (2025) Source for the IDA’s current definition of dyslexia, adopted October 22, 2025.
• Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity, Dyslexia FAQ Source for the prevalence figure: dyslexia affects 20 percent of the population.
• Sounds in Syllables, Homepage Source for confirmation that SIS is an Orton-Gillingham program developed by Sandra Dillon, now administered by ASDEC.