Last Updated on February 4, 2022 by Editorial Team
Reading difficulties are a reality, and the efforts are on to help beginners overcome those sustainably. A few noted educators did commendable work to develop methods that helped working around reading difficulties. Some used the phonetic development approach while others concentrated on lexical knowledge and application of cognition. Based on these approaches, a few language teaching methods emerged. In this post, we examine Lindamood Bell vs. Orton Gillingham. Let’s comparatively analyze these two instructional approaches.
I. Lindamood Bell
What is Lindamood Bell approach?
Lindamood Bell’s approach focuses on sensory-cognitive ways of imparting reading skills. It emphasizes focusing on imagery-words connection to develop comprehension skills and enhance understanding of the word usage in various situations. This approach uses concept imagery and symbols imagery to develop reading and listening comprehension skills respectively.
Best features of Lindamood Bell approach
Lindamood Bell-based instructions for reading have the following characteristic features:
- Individualized learning: Lindamood Bell reading instruction method puts the readers’ abilities in focus while deciding the pace as well as structure of the learning program. The need is to transform the instructional methods as per the learners’ grasping style and not to stress them out in adjusting to the methods available. This approach accomplishes quite a pronounced way of individualizing the learning style.
- Promotes independent learning: The instructions based on Lindamood Bell approach prepare learners for independent learning. Since the students practice both symbol and concept imagery, their associative memory improves. They equip themselves with sufficient knowledge to self-correct themselves and augment the prediction in reading.
- Coding the text dual way: The text has to be decoded semantically as well as conceptually. This approach allows both lexical and conceptual coding by symbol and object imagery association helping learners work their brains to develop language skills.
- Making sensory-cognitive associations: Adopting sensory approach to learn to read process and then building cognition using the things learned are the primary deliverables of this language learning approach.
Utility of Lindamood Bell Approach
This approach finds its best utility in building active reading skills. It is not fair to expect a child to stay glued to reading books. Children put their efforts more wholeheartedly when the learning environment is a bit collaborative. Reading beginners need to practice more and need activity-based practice support. Lindamood Bell’s approach is used for designing summer reading programs, activities in classrooms, and homeschooling programs for reading strugglers.
Evidence-based reading programs based on L-B approach
L-B approach minimizes struggles of reading. Educators have designed certain programs that enabled extracting better participation and maximizing dose-response impact. Some of the reading programs worth trying are:
- Seeing Stars: It is a reading intervention program that utilizes symbol imagery for boosting children’s basic skills. Sight words, orthography, spelling abilities, and ultimately, overall fluency are some of the skills that this program focusses upon.
- Visualizing and Verbalizing: Poor concept imagery is visible in the form of dismal retention abilities. This weakness is addressed head-on with visualizing and verbalizing program; the outputs achieved are better levels of memory, critical thinking, reading and listening comprehension, and fluency in oral and written language expression.
- Talkies: It is simpler than visualizing and verbalizing and focuses on concept imagery weaknesses. The reading program is prescriptive in nature and addresses issues like sentence construction, oral and verbal expressions, and thought disengagement.
- LiPS: It is a phoneme sequencing program for preschoolers. Bringing awareness of the part of mouth used for sounding out words can help memorizing the pronunciation and phonetics; it is based on this thought process. Fluency in speech, reading and spelling are plausible outcomes of this reading program.
Designed primarily for preschoolers and language beginners, this approach can provide a strong primer for robust language build-up.
II. Orton Gillingham Approach
What is Orton Gillingham Approach?
Learning by the way of decoding language skills into smaller ones forms the basis of the Orton-Gillingham approach. It employs an explicit and sequential approach to build literacy skills for beginners. Designed keeping dyslexia and learning difficulties in mind, the approach encourages the use of multisensory learning in the word-building and language development process. Building letter recognition first, and then, moving to higher levels of fundamentals of reading helps the language beginners overcome difficulties.
Features of OG approach
Orton Gillingham’s approach’s principles stipulate taking individualized needs into consideration while applying them to the instruction model. This language instruction approach[1] is:
- Structured
- Explicit
- Multi-sensory
- Direct
- Diagnostic
- Prescriptive
Orton-Gillingham was a neuropsychiatrist-psychologist duo in the 1930s who worked towards understanding the causes of language difficulties and developed solutions for the same. The approach adopted was structured and systematic, and yielded results when utilized in an individualized manner. Phonics building and capitalizing on it to move to higher levels of fluency were the main principles used in this method. This approach offers a playful way of building language skills in children with dyslexia or language disorders.
Utility of Orton Gillingham Approach
Several reading programs were developed based on Orton Gillingham’s approach. Some of these focused on augmenting phonemic awareness skills, others laid emphasis on other reading and writing skills. Examples are:
- All About Reading: Multisensory instructions employed for building phonics, vocabulary and comprehension
- Barton Reading and Spelling: Impacts are Improvement in phonemic awareness, phonological memory and rapidness in name retrieval; overall impact is better vocabulary and improved speaking ability.
- Logic of English: Improvement in reading, spelling and overall handwriting are a few positive outcomes of this reading program.
- Reading Horizons: A multisensory approach that produces improvement in establishing logical outcomes from written text and helps build better comprehension abilities, other deliverables are enhanced memory retention and boost in concept recall.
Which one to pick?
Should you make the choice between the two, it is essential to diagnose the problem and its extent first. Also, have a pilot period for evaluating the progress.
As per a study, OG approach impacted mean ES (effect size) on skills like phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, spelling, etc. to some extent. The approach can serve the purpose better when you have chosen to build skills gradually. Starting with letter recognition, then moving on to sound decoding and coding, and gradually, building other skills on these basic ones help OG followers develop reading fluency over the individualized testing periods.
According to an intervention report, Lindamood Bell Approach-based LiPS program can evidently improve alphabetic or lexical knowledge. It may serve as a primer for preschoolers who start with gaining alphabetic knowledge. Teachers use other reading programs based on LB to give children complete support for building various language skills.
These studies indicate that the reading programs designed with an aim to improve certain skills are to be offered in combination(s) to get a cumulative impact. Having said that, both have utility in the specific areas of language building, are prescriptive in nature, and are to be applied in a learner-centric manner. In any case, burdening the child with reading programs and undue experimenting with methods is not advisable. Keep it simple to make it effective!
Wrapping up
Comparing two approaches is needed to find their utility in a child’s learning curve. These approaches are well-researched, employable, and require collaborative learning for better delivery. As a teacher or a parent, if you intend to offer extra support to the child to overcome language deficiencies, you can employ these approaches. Ample training is a must to achieve seamless dissemination.
References
[1] Orton Gillingham: Who, What, and How, Sayeski, et. al., Teaching Exceptional Children Journal, 2018