Adapting the Multi-Sensory Approach for Middle School Aged Students

The one skill that I teach that I have found reaches the farthest beyond the four walls of my classroom is instruction students on how to syllabitize words. By teaching students to divide words into smaller parts, or syllables, they add a tool to their toolbox when it comes to decoding unknown words (Johns & Lenski, 2010). Once students begin to learn the 7 types of syllables in-depth, they begin to carry these skills to help them encode words as well. By using the rules to syllabitize a word, students can determine the sounds some letters, especially vowel sounds, represent in a word (Palumbo, Kramer-Vide, & Hunt, 2015, p. 110). "Leong’s (1989) finding that when recognizing long words, students used morphemes as units to aid in decoding. Students more skilled at word recognition relied more heavily on morpheme recognition" (Palumbo, Kramer-Vide, & Hunt, 2015, p. 112). Moreover, by using these rules and shortcuts, students are able to attack words in a different ...

"For children and adults who have experiences failure and minimal progress year-after-year in trying to learn to read, self-esteem and attitude toward themselves as people, and school in general, will deteriorate" (Gillingham & Stillman, 1997). If students continue to stay disengaged with reading and find no progress, their dreams and ambitions begin to fade over time. While students who struggle to read may be very bright, they begin to view themselves differently. One way that I have found to foster the love of reading and help students make huge steps in progress is the use of interactive notebooks. These notebooks not only empower students, but serve as "a varied set of strategies to create a personal, organized, and documented learning record" that students can refer back to (Waldman & Crippen, 2009, p. 52). Connecting to the premise of the multi-sensory approach, interactive notebooks and the graphic organizers included inside serve as a visual represe...

Using games in the classroom is not a new idea. Even middle schoolers LOVE to play games. When I first started teaching, my students would find practice reading and spelling their given words monotonous and boring. When instructing students in the multi-sensory approach, students receive many opportunities to practice the pattern using the word-building method. This "builds a close association or link between what the student sees in print (visual), what the student hears (auditory), and what the student feels as he of she makes the sounds of the letters and writes (kinesthetic-large muscle movements, and sensations in the mouth and on the fingertips) (Gillingham & Stillman, 1997). When students are practicing, it is essential that they follow the same "precise, definite, and unvarying procedure- because otherwise one association or another will be lost" (Gillingham & Stillman, 1997). As you can imagine, middle school students began to show pushback.  While repet...

After reading a wealth of research, it is evident that the Orton-Gillingham Approach is effective for students who struggle accessing the English Language. Through an in-depth literature review, it is became apparent that the earlier the intervention of multi-sensory instruction is provided, the more substantial the improvements in reading and spelling are made (Lim & Oei, 2015). Orton-Gillingham was originally developed for early interventions in order to prevent reading difficulties in the future ( Scheffel,  Shaw, & Shaw, 2008).  p. 147). According to  Ritchey & Goeke, (2006) , who  analyzed  over 30 years of Case laws, they determined that ongoing professional development needs to be provided to middle school teachers in order to instruct them on how to adapt the program to meet the differing needs of maturing students. While phonological awareness, phoneme manipulation skills, and basic phonics skills are essential even at the middle schoo...

The Orton-Gillingham instructional approach, developed by Dr. Samuel Orton and Anna Gillingham, was developed for the estimated 10% of students in the school population with deficits in the area of reading, mainly those with Dyslexia. Although Dyslexia is a prevalent term and widely known by the general population, it is often misunderstood. Dyslexia is, “a specific learning disability that is neurological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. There difficulties typically result from a deficit in the phonological component of language that is often unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities and the provision of effective classroom instruction” (Williams & Lynch, 2010, p. 66). Dyslexia often leads to difficulties in areas such as reading comprehension, vocabulary acquisition and understanding, letter and sound associations, rhyming, and both letter and word reversals (...

  When students fail to receive proper literacy instruction, it has been found that 43% of illiterate Americans live in poverty whereas those with strong literacy skills make up only 5% of those living in poverty (Williams & Lynch, 2010, p. 66). This makes the need the Orton-Gillingham remediation approach that much more essential. According to Richey and Goeke (2006), Orton-Gillingham (OG) is a, “Systematic, sequential, multisensory, synthetic and phonics-based approach to teaching and reading. Explicit instruction is provided in phonology and phonological awareness, sound-symbol correspondence, syllables, morphology, syntax, and semantics” (p. 171). Instructing using the multi-sensory approach, engages students in the visual, auditory and kinesthetic/tactile learning pathways, known as the Language triangle ( Ritchey & Goeke, 2006, p. 171) .Orton-Gillingham is a widely accepted intervention for students with dyslexia because it “applies rigorous...