Understanding phonology is critical and matters from preschool through high school (Byrnes & Wasik, 2009) Phonology affects: decoding, spelling, individual pronunciations, and assists in understanding reading disabilities.
Children need a strong vocabulary for literacy to develop. If children do not have a stored set of sounds, they will not build a strong spoken vocabulary.
Troia (2004) set forth specific guidelines for phonological instruction. The following are useful in the middle school classroom:
Engage children in activities that shift their attention from meaning of language to the form of language
Begin with cognitively less challenging activities, such as matching, and then build to more cognitively challenging activities, such as substitution and reversals.
Train students for generalization; improvement in one skill may not transfer to other skills.
In addition, phonological instruction should be explicit. This instruction does not need to be long. It can be ten to fifteen minutes, but it should be embedded throughout the day. As students encounter words in the text, they should be encouraged to sound out the word.