Reading by Rainbow

Teaching English by pure "look-say" --the theory that children need only recognize shapes of whole words rather than individual letters or syllables--is discredited in the U.S.; 30 years of trying it produced two generations of bad spellers and etymological ninnies. But going back to pure phonics does not answer the original objection that learning English's brain-busting disparities of spelling is dull and slow. In Washington, before a class of 29 illiterate adults and teenagers, a teacher named Caleb Gattegno demonstrated a speedy means of teaching reading by an ingenious system of color-coding sounds.

Londoner Gattegno, 54, who made a lot of money by introducing the Cuisenaire rods that help moppets to master math (TIME, Jan. 31), uses a rain-bow-hued set of word charts. They give each of English's 20 vowel sounds a color of its own. Thus the u in up is printed in yellow, and so are the identical-sounding o in done, oe in does, oo in blood. The o in no is tan, and so are seven other spellings that sound the same, like the eau in beau and the ough in though. There are 27 colors for consonant sounds. The sound of n in no is lavender, as is the kn in know and the gn in gnat.

Visual Dictation. Learners first mas ter short pronunciations of the five vowels (the a as in at, e as in pet), then some consonant sounds (p, t, s) to provide the components for a lot of words. Using what he calls "visual dictation," tapping the charts with a pointer, Dr. Gattegno lets students discover with delight that strings of sounds make words, then whole sentences, including such swinging examples as "Pat met on a mat a man as fat as Tim." The decipherability of language thus established, the drill moves on to tougher orthography: weigh, height, eye, diaphragm, for example.

"Color serves as an extra dimension to help the learner associate the image of the letters with the sound until he has mastered it," explains Gattegno. "It makes nonphonetic English a phonetic language without changing the traditional spellings." Once sounds are learned, the rainbow fades. Class books are in bladk on white, and students write in ordinary black. "Within six weeks they seem to rely mostly on form, referring back to the color charts when they have problems in working out words," reports a teacher.

On the second day of the Washington demonstration, Dr. Gattegno's pupils, certified as "functional illiterates" by the welfare department, were triumphantly reading stories from that afternoon's Washington Star. "Maybe I could go to college," mused a short-order cook. "Corny as it sounds, I'd like to read Shakespeare."

On to Hallelujah. Designed originally for teaching illiterate adults (Peace Corpsmen find it intriguing for potential use in illiterate countries), Words in Color is now being tried in 100 schools in seven states. In Euclid, Ohio, where a pilot project was launched last year, five-year-olds read simple stories, first-graders whip through fourth-grade readers. "What do brown, light orange, magenta make?" the teacher will ask. "Pot!" cry the kids. Dr. William Jordan, assistant head of the elementary schools, says: "We have never seen such progress. Our color readers are far ahead of any comparable groups." Students conquer the course, through such words as schist and hallelujah, in six weeks to six months.

Learning so relentlessly nonphonetic a language as English will never become effortless, and Words in Color may be overrated by some of its spectacular early successes. Yet for its nappy discovery that symbolic color sticks in an illiterate's brain quicker than a shape, and its basic expansion of the alphabet (from 26 letters to 47 colors) to match the language's sounds, it gives promise of turning into an educational hit (light blue, pink, magenta).

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.