Have you or someone in your family recently been recommended multisensory, structured literacy intervention with Lindamood-Bell or Orton-Gillingham? As a former Lindamood-Bell employee trained in their programs and who has also studied and received in-depth training in pure Orton-Gillingham, I understand how and why they work for students who struggle to acquire basic reading skills. As a tutoring center owner who often answers this question, I am excited to break down the similarities and differences in these programs to help you decide which might work better for your child. We will look at Seeing Stars (Lindamood-Bell's Reading Program) and pure Orton-Gillingham (rather than an offshoot like SPIRE, Wilson, or Barton) for these comparisons. Both of these programs likely represent a large investment for your family, and a transparent discussion of how they are alike and different may help you in your decision.
Similarities:
Both methods are structured literacy.
The student is introduced to reading step by step. Once one skill is mastered, the next skill is introduced.
Both methods are multisensory.
A sense other than sight and hearing is brought in to make the experience of learning to read more dynamic and create new neural pathways that enable students who have not learned with just vision and hearing. This can look like having students tapping out sounds or airwriting letters.
Both methods were specifically designed for students with dyslexia.
Students who have not met with success with other reading programs often respond to these methods.
Both methods require a high degree of specialized training to implement well.
These are not prepackaged workbooks or scripted lessons. To implement well, they require a high degree of curriculum and individualized student knowledge. Because of this, there is an implementation barrier.
Differences:
Orton Gillingham has a greater focus on the encoding and decoding rules. Orton Gillingham is very focused on reading rules (sometimes called "jingles" or "expectancies"). This program is much more thorough in teaching these rules, which can benefit students with dyslexia who have strong receptive and expressive language. This is a very thorough method of teaching decoding. It can also be very difficult and slow progress for students who do not have strong receptive language. | Lindmood-Bell Seeing Stars teaches fewer rules and always with a verbal and a visual cue. It recognizes that many of our students who struggle to read may also struggle with verbal abilities and emphasizes the visual representation of the rule to go with the jingle. To move to the next level, you must demonstrate that you can use the rule, not a verbal recitation. Also, less common rules are simply taught as examples of sight words rather than rules. |
Lindamood-Bell, Seeing Stars, uses air-writing as a multisensory teaching tool/technique. This technique directly addresses visual working memory and orthographic processing difficulties while also remediating phonological awareness difficulties by forcing kids to hold words in their working memory to decode them, which facilitates faster retrieval later. Orthographic processing strengths are a good indication of both automatic and fast reading ability and spelling. | Orton Gillingham uses tapping and handwriting as multisensory tools/techniques. Tapping supports phonological awareness, and handwriting and spelling can support orthographic processing. Pen and paper practice means better handwriting and incorporation of spelling much sooner. |
Seeing Stars, Lindamood-Bell puts a greater emphasis on direct instruction in both sight word reading and sight word spelling. There is a greater foundational recognition of the role of orthographic processing for students. This means that students will be directly taught words that don't follow the rules sooner. | Orton Gillingham places a much greater emphasis on the rules/jingles. Learning all of the spelling rules and reading rules assumes that sight word recognition will come as a byproduct of learning to decode. This can mean that students who learn OG are better spellers sooner than LB students. |
Lindamood-Bell, Seeing Stars is a more nimble program. If a student demonstrates mastery, you are under no obligation to reteach or make them explain why they know it. You can tailor each lesson to reflect the underlying skill deficits: phonological processing or orthographic processing. | Orton Gillingham is a more thorough program. The checks for moving from one level to the next are robust and well-defined, which means students learn the rules of decoding and encoding more thoroughly. However, this means that sometimes progress can be slower. |
The sequence of the Lindamood-Bell, Seeing Stars program is organized by orthographic difficulty and complexity. This means that multisyllabic strategies are not taught until later in the curriculum which can keep kids from accessing more complex texts. | The sequence of the Orton-Gillingham program is organized according to syllable type. This means that sometimes, orthographically complex words can appear before the student is ready for them. (I find this often happens when tiger/camel is introduced). |
Orton Gillingham teaches the meaning of prefixes and suffixes and teaches students how to use them to determine the meaning of words. This study of greek and latin is so incredibly helpful for students who are struggling to get longer words off the page. | With Seeing Stars/Lindamood-Bell, the emphasis is just on decoding longer words. Comprehension and meaning are not addressed during decoding. |
Orton Gillingham is designed to be done a few times a week over many years. For most students, this is 2 to 3 years of multiple times-per-week tutoring. | Lindamood-Bell programs are often used and recommended intensively or with a concentrated tutoring model. This means that the entirety of decoding and word reading instruction often takes place over a six-—to eight-week period, during which students learn to read quickly. This is a great model (so great that I use it in my learning center), but it is not for everyone, and it is a huge investment. |
It comes down to the fact that BOTH programs are effective for most struggling readers and/or those with dyslexia or (a specific learning disability in reading). The age of the student, as well as the underlying skill profile (phonological and orthographic ability), as well as any attentional or behavioral complicating factors, can mean that for some students, Orton-Gillingham might be more effective, while for some students, Lindamood-Bell might be more effective.
If you would like more information about that, please see part two of this blog: Is Orton-Gillingham or Lindamood-Bell better for my Struggling Reader? for my two cents on which program might be better for your child.