COLOR CODED VOWELS - EXTENDING THEIR USE

Mini grant project by David Henry


I. I use colors to teach 16 vowel sounds of English; each color represents the vowel sound in the name of the color, so gray represents the long a sound and red the short e sound. As you will see, some sounds are represented not by a true color, but a near color such as wood. The colors are:

gray black
brown green
red mauve (aw sound)
white silver
wood gold
aqua oyster
blue umber
purple tan

I make cards with a square of each color and use the cards to teach the color names and the corresponding sound. In my initial presentation I usually use the purple color to explain that we will use the colors because the English sound might be represented by several possible spellings. For example, heard, her, bird, word and hurt all are pronounced with the purple vowel.

II. Previous uses

A. I practice using the color cards to make words by combining them with phonetic symbols. I put a K and a T on the board and hold the black card between them and have the students sound out cat. I then write cat on the board to make it clear that the K is the phonetic sound, not the spelling. Then I hold the umber card between the two consonant sounds and the students sound out cut. I then ask them how to spell the word they sounded out to make sure the sound has meaning for them. Then I hold the gold card between the two sounds and the students sound out coat. At first they frequently have difficulty going from the sound to the proper spelling, but they soon catch on and enjoy the challenge of recognizing the word from the sound.

B. I also use the colors to do minimal pair exercises. To teach students to hear the difference between the long e sound and the short I sound for example I might present a list of minimal pairs as described above. With the list of words on the board, Iíll say one word form the list and ask the students if it has the green sound or the silver sound. Iíve also done this with minimal pair sentences like "They make braid/bread for tourists."

C. As students become more familiar with the colors, I use them to introduce new vocabulary. As I pronounce the new word, I ask them to identify the color of the vowel sound of the word. At first it helps if I lay the color cards out so students can see all their choices. They often try out several colors before they find the right one. When they choose an incorrect color, I will pronounce the word with that incorrect sound then pronounced correctly so they can hear that it is not right.

These exercises have a game like quality to them that the students generally seem to enjoy. When I mispronounce with a wrong color sound the resulting sound can be very funny to hear.

D. Students learn the sound value of the colors very quickly. At this point, the colors become a very quick and unobtrusive reference point to correct pronunciation. For example, if a student pronounces lunch with a long u sound Iíll say something like ěno, thatís the umber sound.î With a little practice, students can self correct using the color code.

III. Advantages

A. Students genuinely enjoy working with the colors. It is the one pronunciation exercise I do that they regularly ask for more practice.

B. The colors quantify the number of vowel sounds for the students. Whereas the number of spelling combinations is so large, with the colors students know they have a fixed number of possible sounds to choose the correct pronunciation from.

C. It reinforces the idea that English letters do not have fixed sound attached to them; that English vowel letters or letter combinations may represent several different vowel sounds. This is especially helpful with my Spanish speaking students. My classroom mantra is ěTrust your ears, not your eyes.î                IV. Inquiry: Can I extend the use of colors to teach spelling patterns?

I had always used the colors to teach pronunciation and specifically to reinforce the idea that English spelling is not a reliable guide to pronunciation. The question I wanted to explore for this project was the possibility of using the colors to teach spelling. While the long a sound is represented in English spelling by several letter combinations, the number of combinations is limited. Can I use the colors to teach the various spelling combinations?

Class work was done with a mixed level class of high beginners, low intermediates and intermediate level students. Almost all the students were Spanish speakers.

First I made a list of words drawn first form the vocabulary in our textbook, then expanded that list to include minimal pairs with a close sounding vowel sound for each word. Then I made word cards. Each word had two cards, on one card the word was written phonetically using the color as the vowel symbol; the second card a properly spelled word with the vowel sound spelled in the proper vowel color. So the word caught would be represented as K[mauve]T and as CAUGHT with the letters AUGH written in mauve.

I was presented with a challenge with the colors black, white, wood and oyster. Since I used black to write the consonant letters, there was no distinction for the words with the short a sound. The cards were made on white card stock, so for the white vowel sounds I outlined the colors leaving them white in the center. The wood color letters I cut out from wood veneer contact paper. The oyster color letters I resorted to a light green color, suggesting it was the color of seaweed or algae growing on the oyster. The students, having mastered the color code concept from my color cards, seemed to have little problem making the switch to a more or less arbitrary color for printing purposes.

Each class I would introduce a set of cards with two or three close sounds. Students would sound out the word from the phonetic card and then indicate some understanding of the meaning of the word by using it in a sentence or giving some example of the word in context. I then used the cards with the correctly spelled words to practice pronunciation and compared them to close sounding words such as cut, coat, caught. Students practiced reading the cards using the color code in the spelling to remind them of the proper pronunciation.

After the students were familiar with about 50 or 60 words, I would pass out 5 or 6 cards to each student and told them not to let anyone else see their cards. Each student would stand up in front of the class and read their cards while their classmates wrote down the words they heard, like a spelling test. After each student finished, we checked the spelling immediately and corrected as necessary. If words were misspelled, I would comment on whether the error was caused by mispronunciation by the reader or misunderstanding by the listener.

V. Results

Although I felt we had spent a disproportionately long time on this exercise (40-60 minutes of a three hour class period over a 5 week period) students surveyed at the end of the term all said they believed the colors to be useful for their pronunciation and listening improvement, most believed it helped their spelling, and most said they would like to do more work with colors, not less.

VI. Observations

I believe I was too tied to the minimal pair discrimination when I drew up my list of words. I think I need to revise the list with more focus on the various spellings of the target vowel sound as well.

Most of the questions I got from students seeking clarification of words had to do with minimal final consonant distinctions such as same/sane or send/sent, so my next word list will focus not just on the vowel distinctions but also these final consonants


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