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Services at OnTrack Reading Centre

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OnTrack Reading Centre provides a variety of diagnostic and responsive instructional methodologies to meet the needs of individual students. Our instruction is based on the Orton-Gillingham approach to reading and follows a structured literacy methodology. 

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At OnTrack Reading Centre, we focus on the five essential components of reading instruction including:

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  • Phonemic Awareness - learning and manipulating the sounds in spoken words

  • Phonics - recognizing the relationship between letter symbols and sounds

  • Vocabulary - understanding words, their definitions and their context

  • Fluency - the ability to read aloud with speed, accuracy and appropriate expression

  • Comprehension - learning to understand the meaning of different texts

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These are the essential building blocks of reading. They are the components of successful reading instruction.

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What is Dyslexia?
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“Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. These difficulties typically result from a deficit in the phonological component of language that is often unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities and the provision of effective classroom instruction. Secondary consequences may include problems in reading comprehension and reduced reading experience that can impede growth of vocabulary and background knowledge.”

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Adopted by the IDA Board of Directors, Nov. 12, 2002. Many state education codes, including New Jersey, Ohio and Utah, have adopted this definition. Learn more about how consensus was reached on this definition: Definition Consensus Project.

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What is Structured Literacy?
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"Structured Literacy (SL) teaching is the most effective approach for students who experience unusual difficulty learning to read and spell printed words. The term refers to both the content and methods or principles of instruction. It means the same kind of instruction as the terms multisensory structured language education and structured language and literacy.

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Structured literacy teaching stands in contrast with approaches that are popular in many schools today, however, many of these other approaches do not teach oral and written language skills in an explicit and systematic manner. The evidence is strong that the majority of students learn to read better with structured teaching of basic language skills, and that the components and methods of Structured Literacy are critical for students with reading disabilities, including dyslexia."

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Moats, L. (2019). Structured Literacy: Effective instruction for students with dyslexia and related reading difficulties. Perspectives on Language and Literacy, 45(2), 9-10.

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Key features of Structured Literacy approaches include:

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  • explicit, systematic, and sequential teaching of literacy at multiple levels - phonemes, letter-sound relationships, syllable patterns, vocabulary, morphology, syntax and semantics

  • cumulative practices and ongoing review

  • diagnostic and responsive

  • hands-on, engaging, and multimodal

  • a high level of student-teacher interaction

  • use of decodable texts; and

  • prompt, corrective feedback

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Structured Literacy is especially well suited for students with dyslexia and language-based reading disabilities as it directly addresses their core weaknesses in phonological skills, decoding and spelling (Moats, 2017).

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