I've been studying with a newish student for a few months. Unlike the majority of my students, this 7th grader is not dyslexic, but like most dyslexics, he is a gestalt thinker and deeply appreciates understanding structure.
I was not hired by this family for clinical intervention nor for orthographic study, though the latter is part of everything I do to some extent. Rather, my services were engaged to lay a solid foundation for writing, both composition and rhetoric, before secondary school in a couple of years. Our study has already been so productive; we have established a shared terminology and understanding of basic linguistic forms, like noun phrase and subordinate clause, and of basic linguistic functions, like subject and direct object and adverbial. We have mostly targeted the sentence level thus far, but I always include a graphic of language structures as a framework for my clinical sessions (shared below).
Although our main focus is not phonology, I did discuss with the parents at the outset that our work would include forays into various linguistic structures, as phonology is inextricably tied to other linguistic systems and forms. Phonology – the structure and system of pronunciation – isn't just realized in words and delimited by morphemes; its effects on how language makes meaning both in speech and in writing also interface powerfully with syntax, the structure of sentences.
One important example of how phonology and syntax interact is manifest in subordinate clauses. Understanding these interactions can be a critical part of becoming a mature writer, and it can be a cue to prescriptively proper punctuation. This came up this past week in our study of subordination – I went to the dictionary to point something out, and it sparked an interest in the IPA symbols repreresenting the possible pronunciations of the word.
Here's how we parlayed that spark into a crash course on how English orthographic phonology works: