What Is Structured Literacy?

Structured literacy is an approach to teaching reading and spelling that helps students understand how English works. Instead of relying on memorization or guessing, students learn the sounds, patterns, syllables, spelling rules, and word structures that make up written language.

One of the best-known structured literacy approaches is Orton-Gillingham. It teaches the whole English language in a clear, step-by-step way that helps students connect sounds, words, reading, and writing together.

The goal is to build a strong foundation that allows a student’s skills to grow step by step over time.

Why does Orton Gillingham work?

The Orton-Gillingham approach is used to teach reading, writing, and spelling. It’s not a “fast” approach to learning, but it’s a thorough approach.

How OG Works

Orton Gillingham uses a scope and sequence that starts with the most basic part of language, the phoneme, which is the smallest unit of sound, and teaches all the sounds letters make – that’s right, many letters have more than one sound! (Think letter s – it says “s” as in moss or it can say “z” as in rose.)

As students grow, the scope and sequence expands into syllable division, vowel teams, spelling rules, prefixes, suffixes, roots, and larger word structures.

Orton-Gillingham is a very thorough way to teach the English language! It’s been used for dyslexic students, but it is a wonderful way for anyone to learn English, and many schools are now adopting OG and other structured literacy approaches to teach in classrooms.

The Orton-Gillingham approach works because it’s thorough, helping students hear, see, and feel what is being learned, and because it has rules associated with learning the English language, giving students reasons for why words work the way they do.

OG Builds Step by Step

Each lesson in the scope and sequence builds upon the next lesson. When students are learning sounds, we are cumulatively adding more sounds and including review as a part of every lesson. Students will constantly be going back and re-learning, or building on the last concept learned.

Modeling is a major part of OG lessons. Show and tell before expecting a student to know what’s going on. Demonstrate what you want from the student.

Repetition is the mother of learning. Repeat, repetition is the mother of all learning. There’s no such thing as over-teaching or over-learning.

A student should succeed before moving forward.

If a student is not connecting with a part of the scope and sequence, we want to continue including it in our lessons until it’s learned. For example, if hearing the difference between short i and short e is a challenge, continue to repeat these sounds in every lesson, even while adding other letters or concepts.

No Guessing Necessary

We want students to use the rules and patterns they are being taught so that guessing becomes less necessary. Orton-Gillingham is full of ways to read and decode to make guessing unnecessary.

We want to give students enough time to answer. Count slowly to 10 if needed, but allow a student time to think and answer.

Flexibility

Orton-Gillingham encourages flexibility in learning. If students have difficulty concentrating, change tasks quickly. Having 15 short tasks might be better than a four-part lesson.

We strive to be flexible enough to know when to stick to the plan and when to loosen up the lesson.