Orton-Gillingham for Hebrew

The area of Jewish Special Education often suffers from the gap between knowledge and practice; thus, many children with learning disabilities at times remain under-served. The purpose of Orton-Gillingham for Hebrew was to address the specifics of teaching Hebrew reading to students with dyslexia and other Language Learning Disabilities. This methodology presents the summary of studies in this area of special education, addresses different reading methodologies, analyzes the unique features of Hebrew and specific aspects of Hebrew reading acquisition, and presents an instructional methodology based on findings and research in this area both in Israel and United States.
Although OG for Hebrew was originally developed for students with reading disabilities such as dyslexia, it could and should be used for anyone, as it takes the learner through the process of synchronization between the audible and written symbols (e.g., Hebrew letters and vowels). This multi – sensory approach is presented in a certain sequence that helps the student to develop awareness of the Hebrew word components, perform the connection between the sounds and whole word and, finally, read the Hebrew word.

Understanding Developmental Dyslexia.

The perception of dyslexia has shifted over the last 30 years from being identified as “learning disability” to a neurologically based disorder.
The term “dyslexia” stems from Greek “dys” (bad, abnormal, difficult) + “lexis” (word). The term was originally used to describe adults who lost ability to read after a brain injury. With time, the term was adopted for defining neurologically based reading impairment in children. As opposed to adult dyslexia, which we define as “acquired dyslexia”, the reading deficiency in children was classified as “developmental dyslexia”.
According to International Dyslexia Association, dyslexia affects approximately 17% of the school-aged population. The primary cause of developmental dyslexia remained unidentified until recently. The functional MRI research have found that people with dyslexia have abnormal connections between some brain regions. As a result, they must rely on alternate brain circuits for reading.
The child diagnosed with dyslexia typically shows an IQ within a normal range but falls below 10% on standardized reading test. It is important to understand that dyslexic children are not lazy or unintelligent. Their brain simply functions differently when it comes to processing information.
Unlike the myth surrounding dyslexia that children “flip letters in the air” or “see the letters backwards”, dyslexia have been associated primarily with auditory disorder. Studies of dyslexia have found that dyslexia is caused by a problem with the phonological processing of speech sounds. This processing deficit means that children do not associate letters with the correct sounds. In other words, they experience a problem of auditory processing, which is a procedure the brain uses to recognize and interpret sounds in the environment. Therefore, it is extremely important that phonological awareness, or the ability to segment words into their components of speech sounds, should be directly and explicitly introduced in the beginning of reading instructions. The plasticity of the brain in young children has a potential to retrain the brain to overcome the learning difficulties, adopt and recognize neural pathways as a result of new experiences of learning.
It is difficult to draw any conclusions about teaching Hebrew decoding or the second language reading programs of Diaspora schools based on the methods that are designed to teach students to read a language that they already know. Therefore, the Jewish educators should not rely on the strategies that their students used for decoding their native tongue. Instead, teachers should be aware of the unique features of the Hebrew language in order to provide students with the most appropriate reading strategies.