Anna Gillingham

Who was Anna Gillingham?

Anna Gillingham was an educator and psychologist. Working with Dr. Samuel Orton, she trained teachers and published instructional materials regarding reading instruction, producing the Orton-Gillingham approach to reading instruction. With Bessie Stillman, she wrote what has become the Orton–Gillingham manual: Remedial Training for Children with Specific Disability in Reading, Spelling and Penmanship. First published in 1935/6, this work is updated and republished regularly. Along with the help of Stillman, Gillingham developed a “sequential, alphabetic-phonetic multisensory program” as a tool with which students could easily create meaningful syllables. This approach eliminated the need for a child to memorize almost all words in language, limiting it to those that were non-phonetic. This teaching manual for the “alphabetic method” of Orton’s theories combined multisensory techniques with teaching the structure of written English, including sounds, meaning units and common spelling rules.