Science of Reading, Structured Literacy, and Orton-Gillingham: 6 Myths We Need to Stop Repeating

Science of Reading. Structured Literacy. Explicit instruction. Systematic phonics. Orton-Gillingham. Multisensory instruction.

If you’re a teacher, you’ve probably heard these terms repeatedly over the past several years.

You may also have heard them presented as competing philosophies, movements, or even identities.

Are you “Science of Reading”? Are you “OG”? Did Structured Literacy replace Orton-Gillingham? Does multisensory instruction have research behind it?

And what exactly does it mean when a curriculum, intervention, school, or professional development session describes something as “evidence-based”?

Somewhere along the way, important conversations about reading research have sometimes turned into conversations about which “team” a teacher belongs to.

Reading instruction is too important for that.

The research is more nuanced than a slogan, a program name, a training credential, or a social media post. And as teachers, we should be able to examine that research without feeling obligated to defend every practice associated with the approaches we use.

That includes Orton-Gillingham.

I’m trained in OG. I’m an OG Teacher and Trainer. I value the approach, and it plays a central role in the literacy intervention we provide at TriPoint.

And none of those things require me to pretend that every claim made about OG is equally supported by research.

In fact, being evidence-aligned requires the opposite.

So let’s look at six misconceptions that continue to show up in conversations about the Science of Reading, Structured Literacy, and Orton-Gillingham, including what the evidence supports, where it is more limited, and what that means for our teaching.

Myth 1: The Science of Reading is a program

It isn’t.

The Science of Reading refers to a broad and interdisciplinary body of research about reading and writing, including how literacy develops, why some learners experience difficulty, and which instructional practices improve outcomes.

And the Science of Reading is not simply another term for phonics.

There is strong evidence for systematic phonics instruction. In a meta-analysis of 38 experiments, systematic phonics produced a moderate overall positive effect on reading compared with unsystematic or no-phonics instruction (d = 0.41) (Ehri et al., 2001).

But effective reading instruction involves more than phonics.

Current federal practice guidance, for example, addresses phonological awareness and letter-sound relationships, decoding and word analysis, academic language and vocabulary, and connected-text reading (Foorman et al., 2016).

So when a curriculum or intervention describes itself as “Science of Reading,” that shouldn’t end our professional analysis.

You cannot buy the Science of Reading. You can buy a program that claims to be informed by it.

Those are two different things.

As teachers, we should be asking what evidence supports the instructional practices we’re being asked to use, what skills we’re actually teaching, and whether our students are responding to that instruction.

Myth 2: Structured Literacy and the Science of Reading are the same thing

They aren’t.

A useful shorthand is:

Science of Reading = the research.

Structured Literacy = an approach to instruction informed by that research.

The International Dyslexia Association (IDA) describes Structured Literacy in terms of both what is taught and how it is taught. Its instructional content addresses multiple structures of language, while its instructional principles emphasize explicit, systematic teaching.

IDA itself cautions that Structured Literacy and the Science of Reading are sometimes used interchangeably even though they are not synonymous. Structured Literacy is informed by reading research (International Dyslexia Association [IDA], 2022).

That distinction matters.

If your school or district tells you, “We’re doing Structured Literacy now,” that tells you something about the direction of instruction.

But it shouldn’t be the end of the conversation.

As teachers, we should still ask:

What does Structured Literacy actually look like in my classroom?

What am I teaching explicitly? Is instruction systematic and cumulative? How are decisions about pacing and sequence being made? How am I using student response to decide what happens next?

The label alone isn’t enough.

Myth 3: Structured Literacy replaced Orton-Gillingham

It didn’t.

When IDA formally selected Structured Literacy as an umbrella term in 2014, the organization stated that it was not intended to replace Orton-Gillingham, multisensory instruction, or other terminology already being used. Instead, Structured Literacy was intended to provide a common umbrella for approaches sharing important instructional characteristics (Malchow, 2014).

More recent IDA materials similarly describe Structured Literacy as having roots in Orton-Gillingham-based programs and Multisensory Structured Language Education (IDA, 2022).

And the history goes back much further than the term Structured Literacy.

Samuel Orton was studying children experiencing significant reading difficulties in the 1920s. His 1925 paper, “‘Word-Blindness’ in School Children,” documented children whose primary difficulty was learning to read (Orton, 1925).

The instructional tradition that subsequently became associated with Orton and Anna Gillingham developed from that early work.

So it is misleading to present Structured Literacy and Orton-Gillingham as competing instructional camps.

Orton-Gillingham helped shape the instructional tradition from which Structured Literacy developed.

But there is an equally important caveat.

History isn’t evidence of efficacy.

An approach being nearly a century old doesn’t prove that every practice associated with it is effective. And recognizing OG’s historical contribution doesn’t require us to defend every practice that has ever been taught under the OG label.

Both things can be true.

As teachers, we can respect the history of an approach while continuing to question, refine, and improve our instruction based on evidence.

Myth 4: Orton-Gillingham is basically multisensory instruction

This may be the misconception that frustrates me most.

Yes, multisensory instruction is associated with Orton-Gillingham.

But Orton-Gillingham is much more than multisensory instruction.

Research describes OG as direct, explicit, multisensory, structured, sequential, diagnostic, and prescriptive (Stevens et al., 2021).

There’s a lot in that description besides multisensory.

OG teaches the structure of language in a planned and direct way. That includes skills such as phonemic awareness, phonics, decoding, spelling, syllable patterns, and meaningful word parts. Many of these practices line up with what reading research tells us about effective instruction (Ehri et al., 2001; Foorman et al., 2016).

These aren’t just parts of OG. They are the most important parts of the work.

The problem is that OG sometimes gets reduced to the activities people can see.

A teacher might ask a student to trace a grapheme while producing its corresponding sound. A student might tap or mark the individual phonemes in a word before blending them.

It’s easy to see those activities and think: That’s OG. They’re doing something multisensory.

But that puts the focus in the wrong place.

Don’t confuse the routine with the reason.

Suppose I ask a student to tap the sounds in the word ship.

The instructional objective isn’t tapping.

I want the student to recognize that ship contains three phonemes, /sh/ /ĭ/ /p/, and develop the ability to segment and manipulate those sounds and connect them to print.

Tapping may give that student a consistent, concrete routine for approaching an abstract linguistic task.

But the tapping isn’t the skill.

The same is true of tracing.

If tracing a grapheme while producing its sound helps a student attend to and establish a grapheme-phoneme association, then I have an instructional reason for using it.

If it isn’t helping that student, repeatedly tracing the letter because “that’s what OG does” misses the point.

And yes, the same goes for the famous sand tray, which I personally don’t use.

Sand is a tool. It isn’t the goal.

This is also an area where we need to be precise about what the research actually supports.

Schlesinger and Gray (2017) directly compared simultaneous multisensory structured-language instruction with structured-language instruction without the simultaneous multisensory component in a very small sample of 11 second-grade students. Both groups learned, but the researchers did not find an additional advantage from the multisensory condition.

Given the sample size, that study certainly doesn’t settle the question.

Hall et al. (2023) provide broader context. Their systematic review and meta-analysis examined 53 studies representing 6,053 students in kindergarten through fifth grade who had or were at risk for dyslexia. Reading interventions produced positive effects overall. The researchers also examined several factors that might explain differences in outcomes, including whether interventions were multisensory. Multisensory status did not significantly explain variation in outcomes.

And now we have an important new contribution to this conversation.

Austin et al. (2026) examined persistent myths and misunderstandings surrounding both the definition and remediation of dyslexia. In discussing Orton-Gillingham, the authors separated its individual defining features rather than treating OG as a single indivisible package.

They concluded that six features associated with OG, direct, explicit, structured, sequential, diagnostic, and prescriptive instruction, have independent empirical support. The feature they identified as lacking independent empirical support was simultaneous multisensory instruction, defined as simultaneously engaging visual, auditory, and kinesthetic or tactile senses (Austin et al., 2026).

That distinction matters.

It does not mean that tapping, tracing, sand trays, or other multisensory routines can never be useful.

It means we should be careful about claiming that simultaneously engaging multiple senses is itself the ingredient responsible for improved reading outcomes.

The research-supported teaching is doing the heavy lifting. The multisensory routine may be a tool used to deliver it.

And that brings us right back to the principle that matters most:

Don’t confuse the routine with the reason.

The strongest case for OG isn’t that a student traces a letter in sand or taps sounds on their fingers. It’s that the approach includes many practices aligned with strong reading research: direct and explicit teaching, systematic phonics, work with speech sounds, decoding, spelling, language structure, and carefully sequenced instruction.

And another part of OG matters just as much: instruction is meant to be diagnostic and prescriptive. We watch how a student responds and adjust instruction based on what that student needs.

Multisensory routines can support that work.

They are tools. They are not the work itself.

As teachers, the question shouldn’t simply be whether a routine is “multisensory.”

We should be asking:

What am I trying to teach, why am I using this routine to teach it, and is it actually helping this student learn?

Myth 5: If it says “Orton-Gillingham” or “Structured Literacy,” it must be evidence-based

Labels don’t teach children.

Good instruction does.

There is strong research support for many of the teaching practices at the heart of Orton-Gillingham and Structured Literacy.

For example, research strongly supports teaching children to hear and work with the sounds in spoken words, connect those sounds with letters, decode words, understand meaningful word parts, and read and spell words (Ehri et al., 2001; Foorman et al., 2016).

And importantly, these are the parts of OG for which the evidence is strongest.

But here’s where we have to be precise about what question the research is actually asking.

Researchers can study the core teaching practices used within OG, such as phonemic awareness, explicit phonics, decoding, spelling, and word structure.

They can also ask a different question:

What happens when we study Orton-Gillingham as a complete instructional approach?

In this kind of research, we aren’t studying phonics or phonemic awareness by themselves. Researchers look at interventions identified as Orton-Gillingham, with their different teaching practices and routines used together, and compare reading outcomes with those from other types of instruction.

We have much less research answering that question.

There’s another complication here that matters: Orton-Gillingham is an approach, not a single standardized curriculum.

Over the years, different programs have taken principles associated with OG and organized them into more standardized curricula. Individual teachers and interventionists may also implement OG somewhat differently depending on their training, the needs of their students, and the instructional decisions they make.

So when we talk about “research on OG,” we aren’t necessarily talking about researchers testing one identical intervention delivered in exactly the same way every time. Different studies may examine different programs or implementations that fall under the broader Orton-Gillingham umbrella.

That variability makes studying OG as a whole more complicated.

But I also think the distinction between an approach and a curriculum is important for another reason.

An approach can evolve.

If research gives us a better understanding of how students learn to read, using OG shouldn’t require us to freeze our teaching in time simply because a particular routine has historically been associated with the approach.

We can preserve the principles at the heart of OG while continuing to examine how we put those principles into practice.

With that context, let’s look at what the research has found.

Stevens et al. (2021) reviewed studies of OG instruction for students who had, or were at risk for, word-level reading disabilities.

For basic reading skills, the average result leaned in favor of OG (ES = 0.22), but the difference was not statistically significant (p = .40). In simple terms, the results favored OG, but they weren’t strong enough for researchers to confidently rule out chance as an explanation for the difference.

Results for vocabulary and comprehension also leaned in favor of OG (ES = 0.14), but again were not statistically significant (p = .59).

The researchers called for larger and stronger studies.

Sometimes this research gets shortened into: “Research shows Orton-Gillingham doesn’t work.”

That’s not what the researchers found.

But it would also go beyond the evidence to say: “Research proves OG is the gold standard for dyslexia.”

The research story around OG is more positive, and more complex, than either of those claims.

Austin et al. (2026) sharpen this distinction further. Their review argues that the well-supported components associated with OG substantially overlap with other Structured Literacy approaches, while the simultaneous multisensory element that most clearly distinguishes OG lacks independent empirical support.

That is important information for those of us who value and use Orton-Gillingham.

It doesn’t require us to abandon OG.

It requires us to understand where its strongest evidence lies.

It comes from directly teaching the skills students need to read and spell. It comes from following a clear and logical sequence. It comes from making instruction explicit instead of expecting students to discover patterns on their own. And it comes from watching how a student responds and changing instruction based on what they need.

And because OG is an approach rather than a single fixed curriculum, following the evidence doesn’t make our instruction less OG.

We can preserve the principles at the heart of the approach while reconsidering particular routines, incorporating stronger evidence, and adapting our teaching as the research develops.

In fact, I would argue that the diagnostic and prescriptive nature of OG asks us to do exactly that.

We observe the learner. We identify what is and isn’t working. We adjust our instruction accordingly.

Why shouldn’t we bring that same mindset to the approach itself?

As someone trained in Orton-Gillingham, that doesn’t bother me.

It shouldn’t.

Evidence should make our teaching better, not threaten our professional identities.

Myth 6: If reading instruction needed to change, teachers must have been doing everything wrong

This one is personal for me.

When my former district began moving from balanced literacy toward Structured Literacy, I attended presentations that sometimes left teachers feeling as though we had spent our careers damaging children.

That was a tremendous turnoff for educators, and understandably so.

Let’s be clear:

Some practices needed to change.

Research has provided compelling evidence for systematic instruction in foundational reading skills. The What Works Clearinghouse, for example, gives its strongest evidence rating to explicit instruction connecting speech sounds with letters and to teaching decoding, word analysis, writing, and word recognition (Foorman et al., 2016).

Systematic phonics instruction has also outperformed unsystematic or no-phonics approaches across a substantial experimental literature (Ehri et al., 2001).

But acknowledging that doesn’t require us to conclude that everything teachers were doing was wrong.

• Reading aloud to children wasn’t wrong.
• Building vocabulary and background knowledge wasn’t wrong.
• Discussing rich literature wasn’t wrong.
• Teaching comprehension wasn’t wrong.
• Developing fluency wasn’t wrong.
• Encouraging children to write wasn’t wrong.
• Helping children see themselves as readers wasn’t wrong.

In fact, contemporary evidence-based guidance still recognizes that reading instruction involves much more than decoding. The same What Works Clearinghouse guide that strongly recommends phonological awareness and decoding also addresses academic language and vocabulary and recommends daily reading of connected text to support accuracy, fluency, and comprehension (Foorman et al., 2016).

So moving toward more evidence-aligned instruction doesn’t require us to throw everything that came before it into the garbage.

It requires us to separate practices supported by evidence from those that aren’t, strengthen areas that were neglected, and remain open to modifying our instruction as the evidence develops.

And we need to remember something when we talk about teachers during these transitions:

Teachers work within systems.

Teachers use curricula selected by districts. They attend professional development selected for them. Their practices are influenced by teacher-preparation programs, administrators, standards, professional organizations, publishers, consultants, and educational policy.

Many teachers were teaching exactly as they had been trained and expected to teach.

Some questioned those practices. Some supplemented their curricula. Some continued explicitly teaching phonics and word structure even when those practices weren’t emphasized by the prevailing program. Others trusted the professional guidance they had been given.

We can acknowledge that some instructional practices were poorly supported without turning individual teachers into scapegoats for larger systemic decisions.

And we should be able to look critically at our previous teaching without interpreting that reflection as a judgment of our worth as educators.

Changing our instruction when the evidence changes isn’t an admission that we were bad teachers.

It’s what professional growth is supposed to look like.

And that’s why the word “science” matters

Perhaps the most important word in Science of Reading is science.

Science isn’t a finished list of commandments.

It’s a process.

Researchers gather evidence. They test hypotheses. Other researchers attempt to replicate their findings. Methodologies improve. Limitations emerge. Sometimes new evidence strengthens existing conclusions. Sometimes it causes us to modify them.

We all watched an unusually public version of this process during COVID-19. Recommendations sometimes changed as evidence accumulated and scientists learned more.

That understandably frustrated people.

But changing a conclusion because better evidence becomes available isn’t evidence that science has failed.

Revision in response to evidence is part of how science works.

Reading research deserves the same humility.

Something being done for 80 years doesn’t make it effective.

One new study doesn’t automatically overturn decades of converging evidence.

And sometimes the most scientifically responsible answer is: “We don’t know yet.”

That’s particularly important as terms such as Science of Reading have moved beyond academic research and into legislation, curriculum purchasing, professional development, advocacy, commercial products, and social media.

Those surrounding debates can become political.

But whether students benefit from a particular instructional practice is ultimately an empirical question, not a political identity.

As teachers, we should be able to examine the evidence without choosing a team.

Where TriPoint stands

At TriPoint Autism & Literacy Education Services, Orton-Gillingham is at the heart of our literacy intervention.

We use OG within an evidence-aligned Structured Literacy approach because many of its core principles and teaching practices align with what reading research tells us about effective instruction.

But using Orton-Gillingham doesn’t mean treating every OG routine as equally important or refusing to question a practice simply because it has been part of the approach for a long time.

We can believe strongly in OG and still follow the evidence.

In fact, one of the parts of Orton-Gillingham that we value most gets far less attention than sand trays, tapping, tracing, and other multisensory activities:

Instruction should be diagnostic and prescriptive.

We pay attention to the student.

We assess. We teach. We watch how the student responds. We look at progress. Then we use that information to decide what to teach next, how to teach it, and what may need to change.

That is what good OG instruction should do.

Multisensory routines can be useful tools within that instruction. But the routine is never more important than the reason we’re using it.

Don’t confuse the routine with the reason. Don’t confuse a program with the evidence. And don’t confuse a label with good instruction.

As teachers, we should keep asking:

What am I teaching? How am I teaching it? Why am I teaching it this way? What evidence supports it? Is this student progressing? And if not, what am I going to change?

Our responsibility isn’t to prove that Orton-Gillingham was right all along.

It isn’t to prove that balanced literacy was entirely wrong.

And it isn’t to defend Structured Literacy simply because that’s the terminology we use today.

Our responsibility is to our students.

That means using the best evidence available to us today, measuring whether our instruction is actually working, and having enough humility to change tomorrow when better evidence tells us we should.

Because the goal isn’t to prove that we were right all along.

The goal is to keep getting better.