What is Directional Guidance?
Directional guidance is the distinguishing characteristic of Blend Phonics. This is the special feature that prevents whole-word dysleixa and cures it. Many phonics programs teach word families (at, hat, mat, pat, sat, fat, etc.) and often try to teach phonics using analogy from memorized sight-words. This is often called inductive or embedded phonics. Unfortunately the word guessing reflex that is developed when sight-words are taught first interferes with later phonics instruction. Whole-word dyslexia is essentially what you get when students are not taught to look carefully at all the letters in the words from left to right. Blend Phonics teaches one letter at at time: b + a = ba + t = bat. Blend phonics is a technique that appears under various names. It used to be called single-letter phonics.
