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Phonological Processing and PhonicsThe best known phonics method is the Orton-Gillingham Multisensory Method, developed in the 1930's by Anna Gillingham under Dr. Samuel Orton as a new way of teaching the phonemic structure of written language to people with dyslexia. The goal was to create a sequential system in a multi-sensory approach, as dyslexic people learn best by involving all their senses: visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic. Phonemic Awareness is the first step. Phoneme/Grapheme Correspondence is next. Here you teach which sounds are represented by which letter(s), and how to blend those letters into single-syllable words. The Six Types of Syllables that compose English words are taught next, then Probabilities and Rules (because the English language provides several ways to spell the same sounds). Roots and Affixes, as well as Morphology are then taught to expand a student's vocabulary and ability to comprehend unfamiliar words. The Barton Reading & Spelling System is a simplified one-to-one version of the Orton-Gillingham.
The problem with this approach is that training leads to improvements in the area which has been trained, but it is much more difficult to ensure that this generalises to reading skill overall. The most difficult task is to improve children's standard scores in literacy, because these take age into account, and are often based on irregular words which do not improve with phonological training. Therefore the results from the US National Reading panel (2001) show improvement in phonological skills, but this has not always generalised into accurate reading, nor typically has this improvement generalised into more fluent reading. |
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