"With the growing number of students reading below grade level, the community must provide instruction to meet the needs of all learners. The Orton-Gillingham approach delivers instruction to struggling readers through the direct application of systematic, multisensory, synthetic phonics to their decoding skills. The purpose of this quasiexperimental study was to explore the effectiveness of using the Orton-Gillingham variant that delivers instructions through direct teaching with struggling readers. The study investigated whether first grade struggling readers, those who score below the 30th percentile, will make greater progress in decoding skills with phonics instruction that is based on a highly systematic and multisensory instructional approach than struggling readers using a traditional design. The experimental group received multisensory instructions through direct teaching of synthetic sequential phonics using Orton-Gillingham approach while a control group received phonics instruction using a traditional basal reading approach. Pretest and posttest scores on the Woodcock Reading Mastery Test measured progress on word attack and word identification. Data analyses using t-test results support that direct instruction using systematic, multisensory, synthetic phonics techniques significantly increased the decoding skills of readers. Implications for social change include change in teaching practice to enhance early literacy instruction and provide struggling readers who have not been successful in a traditional approach with an alternative program of phonics instruction."--Prelimimary page.