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Orton-Gillingham Alternative: Fast ForWord
Slow progress with Orton-Gillingham is not unusual. Fast ForWord works faster because it addresses the source of difficulty.
Two Different Approaches to Resolving Reading Issues
“In our experience, a child with APD will likely make extremely slow progress or no progress at all on Orton Gillingham… The auditory issues must be corrected first.”
WNY Dyslexia Specialists, Orton-Gillingham providers
If your child is on Orton-Gillingham and making slow progress, and you are looking for programs better than Orton-Gillingham, consider Fast ForWord software at home with educator oversight.
While the quote from WNY refers to an APD diagnosis, most struggling readers have auditory delays that hinder phonics and decoding fluency. So their advice to seek an Orton-Gillingham alternative applies to almost all children with reading delays.
Orton-Gillingham and Why It’s Slow
Orton-Gillingham was developed in the 1930s to teach children with language processing delays phonemic awareness, the ability to pick up the sounds inside words, which is crucial to learning how to read.
It’s a multi-sensory approach that builds a child’s auditory word memory sound by sound. Each phoneme (there are 40+) is taught in isolation and then built upon using highly repetitive exercises, one at a time.
It is methodical, but time-consuming, and because it’s drill-based and repetitive, it’s not a great experience for your child. Finally, because it generally requires a 1-on-1 tutor, it is expensive.
The Orton-Gillingham protocol includes 3-4 sessions a week, each 45-60 minutes, typically in person. Early results take 3-6 months as some common blends are mastered, making it possible to sound out more words. It takes 18 months or more for a student to be trained on all of the 40 phonemes used in English.
Why Fast ForWord is Much Faster
Many families come to us, frustrated with the slow progress with Orton-Gillingham and/or their child’s pushback.
The fastest way to resolve a problem is to find the cause and fix it. That’s the theory behind Fast ForWord by Gemm Learning. It addresses language processing and related skill gaps that hinder phonemic awareness and reading. In contrast, Orton-Gillingham addresses the language-processing delay.
Fast ForWord exercises and strengthens auditory processing delays using acoustically modified and slowed-down sound discrimination (/ma/ vs /na/), sequencing, and other exercises that start slowly and add speed and complexity in tiny increments.
As language processing improves, phonemic awareness improves, and children will start picking out letter sounds in words naturally, like good readers. Once your child can process phonemes, their brain will start mapping those sounds in auditory memory, as typical readers do from the outset, and then reading can be automatic.
Gemm Learning students work from home for 30 minutes a day, 5 days a week, for 6-8 months. Our students average 2+ years of reading gain in ~6 months. Computer game-like exercises with animations and rewards to keep students engaged. More on our online reading programs here.
Note: Earobics was another software program used before Orton-Gillingham was discontinued.
Orton Gillingham vs Fast ForWord
If you are looking for programs better than Orton Gillingham, consider Gemm Learning:
- It works much faster,
- the exercises are more engaging for your child,
- the at-home, log-in-anytime schedule is easier, and
- its scope is more comprehensive, going from phonics to reading comprehension.
Gemm Learning provides Fast ForWord at home with remote professional oversight.
If you are unsure whether your child is a candidate for Fast ForWord, schedule a 1-on-1 consultation, call 877.914.4366, or request a demo to see the exercises in action and a video overview of Fast ForWord.
After receiving the news that her daughter had improved 4.7 years in reading within one year, mom shared, “On the final report card for last year, she was up in every class and all her teachers noted enormous improvements in her academic abilities! There’s still room for growth, but it seems natural age and behavior type growth like focusing on the quality of our work not the speed.”
“It is just amazing how much easier he seems to find following directions now. His vocabulary has grown in leaps and bounds in 1st grade and we are seeing much less resistance to reading. This program has helped our son turn the corner and I am far less worried about his future than I was before coming in.”
Remediating Language Processing For Dyslexia
Gemm Learning — founded in 2006 — provides Fast ForWord online software supported by individualized oversight. Fast ForWord is evidence-based and has helped 3 million students worldwide.
Fast ForWord is an effective program for struggling readers and dyslexia. It uses rapid-fire, repetitive, and adaptive exercises that provide an intensity of experience that a tutor cannot replicate.
This is the kind of intensity required to move the needle, to improve language processing and the related skills that cause reading difficulties, including reading programs for dyslexia, in just a few months.
If you are unsure if Fast ForWord is the right fit for your child, schedule a call with a Gemm Learning specialist.
Appendix
Orton-GIllingham Developed in 1930’s
The Orton-Gillingham method was developed at a time when very little was known about the brain. For instance, back then there was no knowledge of brain plasticity. It was thought that learning skills were fixed.
And so the only way to teach reading to a child with a language processing disorder was to teach sound by sound.
It was a brilliant idea. And while this is still a reliable way to teach reading, if a child really can’t hear the sounds – if |ba| and |da| sound the same — learning the written language sound by sound is a long and tedious exercise.
In the 1930’s there were no options to help language processing. Today there are solutions.
The Language Activity Gap
If founders Orton and Gillingham had been able to look at an fMRI image of the brain while reading – as seen here — they would have seen that their research was right! In most cases, reading is a language-processing problem.
This functional MRI image of a brain reading tells the story. Average readers rely on the brain’s language regions and their auditory word memory. Every word they read has a corresponding word in their auditory memory.
Struggling readers do not have a reliable auditory memory because their language processing makes it hard to hear the sounds — the words are muddy, heard like sounds through water. And so when they see a word like tent, chances are they have never heard the last |t|, and so the word is not in auditory memory.
You can see in this fMRI image that the struggling reader is using a lot more of the brain, engaged in workaround strategies – guessing, getting clues from pictures, etc. This is the signature fMRI pattern of dyslexia.
Since the advent of fMRI in the 1980s, scientists have analyzed how language processing affects reading. They have also been able to test and take advantage of brain plasticity, the ability of the brain to change.
Put the two together – using fMRIs to check if certain exercises can impact brain patterns, most specifically, activate language regions of the brain for struggling readers — and you have a 21st-century solution to reading difficulties, including a dyslexia diagnosis.
“She was one of those kids with all the classic symptoms of auditory processing problems. We just wanted to let you know that her first period report card was excellent for the first time ever! She received 4 A’s and 2 B’s. This is a first for her. She is so proud of herself. We had the first good parent/teacher conference ever as well. All of her teachers are very pleased with her progress and believe that she is finally on the path to success! We continue to be thankful for stumbling upon Gemm. I have attached her report card so you can also see the wonderful comments her teachers have made. Thank you.”