Science of Reading, Structured Literacy, and Orton-Gillingham: What Parents Actually Need to Know

Maybe your child is struggling to read, and suddenly you’re hearing a whole new language.

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

If you’re trying to figure out what kind of support your child needs, all of those terms can get overwhelming pretty quickly.

Here’s the good news: you don’t need to become a reading expert to ask good questions about your child’s instruction.

But understanding a few key differences can help you make sense of what you’re hearing from teachers, schools, tutors, and interventionists.

So let’s break it down.

What is the Science of Reading?

The Science of Reading is not a curriculum or a program.

It’s a large body of research from multiple fields that helps us understand how children learn to read, why some children struggle, and which types of instruction are most likely to help.

And despite the way the term is sometimes used, the Science of Reading does not simply mean phonics.

Phonics is an important part of learning to read, and there is strong evidence supporting systematic phonics instruction (Ehri et al., 2001). But reading also involves skills such as understanding and working with the sounds in spoken language, building vocabulary and background knowledge, developing fluency, and understanding what we read (Foorman et al., 2016).

One way to think about it is:

You cannot buy the Science of Reading.

You can buy a curriculum or program that claims to be informed by the research.

That distinction matters.

What is Structured Literacy?

If the Science of Reading is the research, Structured Literacy is one way that research can inform instruction.

Structured Literacy emphasizes direct, explicit, systematic teaching of the structures of language.

That means we don’t simply hope a child will figure out how written language works through exposure.

We teach it.

We help children understand how speech sounds connect to letters, how those letters work together in words, how words can be broken into meaningful parts, and how those skills support both reading and spelling.

The International Dyslexia Association describes Structured Literacy as an approach grounded in the Science of Reading (International Dyslexia Association [IDA], 2022).

So:

Science of Reading = research.

Structured Literacy = instruction informed by that research.

They’re connected, but they aren’t the same thing.

Where does Orton-Gillingham fit?

Orton-Gillingham, often shortened to OG, has a long history in reading intervention and helped shape the instructional tradition that eventually became associated with Structured Literacy.

But there’s an important distinction here too:

Orton-Gillingham is an approach, not a single curriculum.

Different programs have taken OG principles and organized them into more standardized curricula. And individual OG teachers may make somewhat different instructional decisions depending on their training and the needs of the child in front of them.

At TALES, Orton-Gillingham is at the heart of our literacy intervention.

We value OG because many of its core principles align with what reading research tells us about effective instruction. Teaching should be direct and explicit. Skills should be introduced in a thoughtful sequence and build on one another. Children should receive direct instruction in the sounds and structures of language, decoding, spelling, and word structure.

But there’s another part of OG that matters tremendously to us:

Instruction should be diagnostic and prescriptive.

Those words sound technical, but the idea is actually pretty simple.

We pay attention to your child.

We assess. We teach. We watch how your child 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.

Your child doesn’t need to fit the program.

The instruction needs to respond to your child.

What about all the multisensory activities?

This is probably one of the most recognizable parts of Orton-Gillingham.

You may see a child tapping sounds on their fingers, tracing a letter while saying its sound, marking sounds in words, or using other activities that involve multiple senses.

Those activities can be useful.

But there’s an important distinction:

The activity isn’t the goal.

Imagine a child tapping the sounds in the word ship.

The goal isn’t for the child to become really good at tapping.

The goal is for the child to recognize that ship contains three speech sounds, /sh/ /ĭ/ /p/, and eventually become more skilled at connecting those sounds with print for reading and spelling.

The tapping is a tool.

Research has found strong support for many of the instructional practices used within OG, while evidence that simultaneously engaging multiple senses provides an additional reading benefit is much more limited (Austin et al., 2026; Hall et al., 2023; Schlesinger & Gray, 2017).

That doesn’t mean multisensory activities are bad or should disappear.

It means we shouldn’t confuse the activity with the learning.

Or, as we like to say:

Don’t confuse the routine with the reason.

If a routine helps your child learn, there may be a good reason to use it.

If it isn’t helping, simply doing more of it because “that’s what OG does” misses the point.

Does the label really matter?

Yes and no.

Terms such as Structured Literacy and Orton-Gillingham can tell you important things about an instructional approach.

But a label alone cannot tell you whether the instruction is good or whether it is working for your child.

Research supports many of the core practices associated with OG. At the same time, when researchers have looked at Orton-Gillingham interventions as a whole, the research base is smaller and the findings are more nuanced than claims that OG has been proven to be the single “gold standard” for dyslexia intervention (Stevens et al., 2021).

That doesn’t mean OG doesn’t work.

It means parents deserve more than a label.

So if someone tells you a program is “Science of Reading,” “Structured Literacy,” “evidence-based,” or “Orton-Gillingham,” you can ask:

• What will you be teaching my child?
• How will you know what my child needs?
• How will you measure whether my child is making progress?
• What will you change if my child isn’t progressing?

Those questions can tell you much more than the name printed on a program.

What should I remember as a parent?

You don’t need to memorize research studies or learn every piece of reading terminology.

And you certainly don’t need to choose a “team.”

At TALES, we use an evidence-aligned Orton-Gillingham and Structured Literacy approach because we believe strongly in explicit, systematic, responsive reading instruction.

We also believe no program, approach, or routine should ever become more important than the child sitting in front of us.

A label doesn’t teach a child. Instruction does.

And good instruction should never be frozen in time. As research develops, our teaching should develop with it. That doesn’t make an approach weaker. It makes our use of it more thoughtful.

So when you’re trying to decide whether reading support is right for your child, you don’t need to start by asking whether one label is better than another.

Start with a simpler question:

Is my child learning?

Then keep asking it.

Because the goal isn’t to prove that one approach was right all along.

The goal is to help your child become a stronger, more confident reader.