The Reading Clinic has become the first international centre to receive accreditation from the Orton-Gillingham Academy.

Orton-Gillingham Academy specialist Jean Foss was on the Island last month to carry out the assessment and said she was pleased with the work done at the Reading Clinic.

The Orton-Gillingham multisensory reading system uses all the senses in order to achieve the goal of literacy.

It was started by Dr. Samuel Torrey Orton, who was a neuro-psychiatrist and pathologist.

He was a pioneer in focusing attention on reading failure and related language processing difficulties.

Dr. Orton brought together neuro-scientific information and principles of remediation, and as early as the 1920s, he had extensively studied children with the kind of language processing difficulties now commonly associated with dyslexia. And he formulated a set of teaching principles and practices for such children.

His partner Anna Gillingham was a gifted educator and psychologist with a superb mastery of the language.

While working with Dr. Orton, she trained teachers, and compiled and published instructional materials.

Over the last 50 years the Orton-Gillingham approach has been the seminal and most influential intervention designed expressly for remediating the language processing problems of children and adults with dyslexia.

Ms Foss said the Orton-Gillingham way had been adopted by many organisations, who claim they can help students learn to read, but she warned often the teachers had not been properly trained.

She said the Academy only has 15 accredited centres in the United States.

Ms Foss said the training that the Orton-Gillingham teacher had to endure was more than a quick morning session.

?The training is very extensive so that the Orton-Gillingham tutor can use any material, and teach any student, at any stage with any particular breakdown,? she said, ?The training standards are very high.

?So this (The Reading) Clinic has submitted a self-study document of both the services of the Clinic and the training that they do.?

Ms Foss added that in order to achieve the lowest level of membership at the Academy tutors had to spend a minimum of 45 course-supervised-practical-hours over a year-long period.

?You can?t aspire to even the lowest level of membership if tutors haven?t had that amount of training,? she said, ?And that is only to say you have begun and anyone with that amount of training can?t practice alone.?

Ms Foss said the Reading Clinic was doing a fine job using the Orton-Gillingham multisensory approach.

Ann Dunstan Reading Clinic president said the aim was to become accredited to become a part of the Donor Forum, an organisation set up to assist charities with funding.

?No student was ever refused help,? she said, ?This year we have allocated $100,000 in financial assistance for students. ?The companies who support us, support children.?

Ms Foss said the hardest part about the entire remedial process was the lack of understanding.

She said: ?This particular approach works with anyone, but for whom it is really necessary, is the bright dyslexic person, who has been smart enough to pass the fact that they can?t do it, and who have so much invested and in the past and in protecting (the fact that they cannot read), that sometimes it is very hard for them to say, ?I do have this problem and I?ve got to go back and do it.

?That is kind of a hard transition and that is the price that the Orton-Gillingham student has paid. There is so much hurt, shame and guilt in all the stuff that goes with it.?

She said the Orton-Gillingham students learn through the language structure and often dyslexic students do not realise that most sounds in English are represented by a letter or a choice of one or two letters.

?Dyslexic people don?t hear vowels and a vowel is what makes the sound for a word,? she said.

?They don?t know how to spell them so their writing often becomes a string of consonants.?

She said the first thing the Orton-Gillingham tutor does is to systematically build up the most predictable associations of sounds and the letters that spell them.

?It is not enough to read and the approach is to not only tell someone, but to have them hear it, and have them see it, have them say what it is, have them write what it is, and have them read it back,? she said.

?So it is called multisensory instruction. In essence every teaching act will activate all of the areas of the brain. It builds from the sound and the syllable and if you can do several then you can pronounce the word.

?They (the students) go as quickly as they can, but as slowly as they must.?

She said if reading problems present themselves early then they can be dealt with, but there was a difference in teaching children and adults.

?For the five-year-old, if you know that reading challenges are going to be a problem, it can be prevented by teaching that child from the beginning,? she said.

?Young children, who have perhaps had a beginning of not reading correctly, depend on memory.

?So, very often it is easier to teach an adolescent or an adult ? someone whose thinking and analytical processes have kicked in to allow them to substitute thought for memory.

?At different stages you are using slightly different approaches, but the beauty of this approach is that it is diagnostic and flexible enough to adapt to who the learner is.?

Ms Foss said teaching people to read was one of the most rewarding things that one could do and her involvement in the Orton-Gillingham approach was purely by happenstance.

?It was totally serendipitous,? she said, ?A school opened in Vermont back in the late 60s for students with dyslexia and learning disabilities.

?I went as a resident of the community and took their training and at first became so frightened by the awesome responsibility, but when I got over that I was interested in the challenge of seeing a bright person, who could do anything under the sun except read and write, learn.

?I was able to sit there and watch that break down and then have the opportunity to figure out why and how to get around it.?

And it was so fascinating to her then, that Ms Foss has been doing it for 30 years.

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For more information on Orton-Gillingham visit www.ortonacademy.org. ( The Reading Clinic on 292-3938 or email readingclinicibl.bm.