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Words in Color as an Appropriate
Technology - William Bernhardt
Technology, as it appears in the traditional classroom all over the world, is largely invisible
even to the educators who use it. Yet a blackboard and a pointer, a chart of the alphabet and a
dictionary (the list could be extended, even for the more impoverished classroom) are no less
evidence than the most up-to-date multimedia computer system that tools in support of
literacy learning - technologies, in short - are ubiquitous and indispensable. Whether noticed
and acknowledged or not, some version of technology is present in every classroom.
Indeed, books themselves are a product of many converging technologies for paper making,
printing and the transmission of text from author to publisher to reader. It was, in part, due to
rapid technological progress in the making of books during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries that the production costs of reading matter became low enough to make possible the
vast expansion of literacy that continues today. In other words, the development of
technology over the past few hundred years has been a crucial factor in bringing the world to
believe that literacy can and should be universal.
Within the highly developed educational marketplace of the United States, Europe or Japan,
new technologies for literacy teaching and learning are constantly arriving and soliciting the
attention and patronage of educators whose own experience was largely spent in traditional
classrooms with a much more limited technological base. Nor are the educational systems in
less affluent societies free from the blandishments of hucksters promising technological
solutions for training teachers and teaching students. Now, educators on every level in
virtually every country ask for advanced technology in general (and computers in particular).
Teachers of literacy are no exception.
It is easy to be so distracted by colorful screens and all the bells and whistles or emerging
technologies that the extent to which the traditional "chalk and talk" and much of the new
"interactive media" resemble one another is missed. In the computer-assisted literacy
programs of today, the screen is still most often used as an electronic blackboard on which
lessons appear for the learner to follow and respond to minimally. The program, imitating a
traditional teacher, text or workbook, describes to the learners (who can perfectly well see for
themselves) what is on the screen and highlights (points to) items which they must then
replicate and feed back. A multitude of flashing lights, cartoon figures and other devices and
conventions borrowed from entertainment technologies familiar to the students replace the
traditional teacher's attempts to entertain and capture their attention. Thus, "edutainment"
becomes the vehicle for a drill and practice methodology not very different, in essence, from
what transpires in the traditional classroom. In fact, many traditional classrooms are actually
far more "interactive".
Whether the teacher is writing lists of words on the chalkboard or turning on a computer

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monitor that will present the same material in a much more animated and entertaining format,
he or she is transmitting a similar message to the learner: You must be "motivated" by
external stimuli in order to contribute your attention; you come with little or nothing, the
instruction has to provide you with everything; what is going on in front of you is much more
important than what is going on in you.
Many, perhaps most, present-day educators would insist that they do not subscribe to these
assumptions and yet it is beliefs like these that clearly underlie their criteria for choosing and
implementing technologies in the classroom. If not, why would they choose the
entertainment-saturated programs which they do?
Words in Color, the literacy learning materials invented by Caleb Gattegno (1911-88),
provide an alternative approach, free of entertainment, based on an epistemology that he
called The Science of Education. Gattegno elaborated his approach over a long period of time
in an extensive series of books and presented his ideas and techniques in experiential
workshops for teachers during the last three decades of his life.
Due to the volume and variety of Caleb Gattegno's writings, and the many different fields to
which he contributed, considerable time and space would be required to cover even the basic
assumptions of his work. The history and fortunes of Words in Color, which had its origins in
a project in Ethiopia (under UNESCO auspices) in the nineteen fifties, are also broad topics.
However, such considerations lie outside the scope of this paper. Interested readers may wish
to follow up by consulting the works cited in the attached bibliography.
As a multilingual and multicultural person of Sephardic Jewish background born in
Alexandria, Egypt under the British Mandate, Gattegno looked at the challenge of literacy and
the creation of an adequate technology for its acquisition from a very broad perspective. He
also drew on his reading and research in diverse fields, including mathematics, psychology,
linguistics and what were then the emerging sciences of cybernetics and information theory.
In Gattegno's epistemology, every human is a learning system, engaged in knowing itself and
whatever comes its way, which obviates the need for external "motivation". More
specifically, each individual, by its nature, is inclined to join, first the community of speakers,
and then that of readers and writers within his or her own culture. In meeting the challenges
that present themselves, individuals use their very considerable powers of awareness,
intuition, perception, etc., especially their self-awareness, which makes it possible for them to
monitor their own behavior and inner dynamics. Finally, awareness of awareness enables
them to re-discover and consciously intervene in mental and somatic abilities that have
become so routinized and automatized that they generally pass unnoticed.
Focusing more narrowly on Words in Color, we can say that Gattegno proceeded from three
questions which are fundamental for literacy learners of all ages and situations:
▪ What does each learner bring in terms of skills and knowledge that are
fundamental/essential to becoming literate?
▪ What are the demands of reading the native language that are not a part of what all learners
already know?
▪ What is the simplest and most cost-effective technology for mobilizing the knowledge and
powers of the learners to acquire what they don't know and can't invent?
The simple answer to Gattegno's first question is that learners arrive fluent in the spoken
language(s) associated with their environment, of which written texts are transcriptions. If, as
he insisted, reading and writing are essentially processes for making transformations between
actual and virtual speech, then the learners arrive very richly endowed for the acquisition of
literacy. They have already mastered the code of arbitrary sounds which comprise their
language, a code which, to the initiated, contains within it sufficient acquaintance with

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vocabulary, phonology and grammar to support fluency and confidence. Although various
languages appear to outsiders to present varying degrees of difficulty, the native speakers of
all languages approach the acquisition of literacy equally well prepared in this important
sense. Not only do the learners come with their language, they also bring with them the
powers of learning that they needed, as babies and young children, to cross this crucial
threshold into the human community. For example, they bring the powers of perception
("hearing" and "listening") to discriminate between sounds as well as the capacity for action
("speaking") to combine and recombine the limited set of vowels and consonants that is
characteristic of their language into the thousands of words and grammatical structures which
they know. That they have already acquired at least one language proves the existence of such
abilities of perception and action, abilities that are equally essential to reading and writing.
What the learners don't already have — and here is the answer to Gattegno's second question
— is the knowledge of their language's written code of signs for conveying a visual
transcription of the spoken language. And here, to make things a bit more complicated, there
are fundamental differences among languages in the magnitude of the challenge presented to
the learners. The character system of Chinese, for example, makes greater demands than the
written code of any alphabetic language. Among the alphabetic languages, moreover, English
and French present codes that are considerably more elaborate and inconsistent than that of
Spanish. In any case, one could successfully speak a language for a lifetime without
spontaneously acquiring any insight into its written form.
A further complication must also be mentioned here. Because many learners, especially those
in remedial classes, lack conscious access to the powers of listening and uttering that once
enabled them to achieve fluency in speech, it often appears that they must be "taught" the
spoken language as part of learning to read and write. Words in Color, however, provides
means for the learner to reconnect with those abilities, and is based on the recognition that
they are there and functioning at a now automatic level.
Gattegno's answer to the third question - What technology could bring the powers of the
learners and the demands of the written language together? - led to his invention of the
famous charts, from which Words in Color takes its name, in which each sound of a language
is color coded and all of the variant spellings of a single sound are printed in the identical
color. This convention allowed him to display, within a limited amount of wall space, all of
the sounds and spellings of any language as they appear in a selection of words, representing
a wide range of vocabulary in terms of meaning, frequency and many other criteria. Other sets
of charts, known as "Fidels", present all of the sounds arranged so that all of the spellings of
every sound in the language are listed in a single column. Spanish takes but a single chart to
contain this information, whereas English requires eight!
Learners coming to these charts for the first time are not told anything about them in advance.
Instead, they are encouraged to use their powers of perception and action to observe and say
what they see. (Remedial readers might be given the entire array to examine as the basis for
their work, whereas beginners might confine their examination to only a single chart.)
Looking at the charts with the aid of a pointer to focus their attention, the learners can observe
that the colors of signs in words they already know ("pup", "it") are the same as the colors of
other signs in words that are mysterious to them ("puppet"). Further, they may notice that two
words they already know ("sick", "kiss") have the same colors in them, but not necessarily in
the same order. Given only a single item of information (which many will infer for
themselves, without any help from the teacher), "the same color always represents the same
sound", learners can independently decode any "new" words containing familiar colors. They
can also practice the transformation of one word into another by adding, inserting,
substituting and reversing sounds.

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When educators who are new to Words in Color observe a lesson such as the one described
above, they often feel bored and impatient because of the lack of entertainment and
explanation. They ask themselves how their own students could possibly become motivated
or understand what to do if subjected to a similar lesson in their own classrooms. At the same
time, they may not notice that the students in the actual class they are observing share little of
their boredom and impatience. Nor do they notice that most of the talking in the class is done
by the learners rather than the teacher.
Gattegno showed his concern for learners by providing challenges rather than entertaining or
telling. Because his materials and teaching approach throw the learners back on their own
considerable powers, they feel encouraged to use everything they have. The approach triggers
the learners' activity and the mobilization of their own energy instead of relying on the teacher
to present and explain.
Silence and the use of a pointer are critical components of Words in Color as a technology
which mobilizes learners' inner resources rather than motivating them externally. Silence, as a
technology for teaching, can be described in its operations by analogy to a "toggle switch".
Whenever the teacher becomes aware that the learners can grasp whatever they are working
on through their own perceptions and intuitions, by noticing rather than by listening, the
teacher's speech-making automatisms are instantly switched to "off". If the learners can look
at the charts, for example, and see that two signs with a different shape share the same color
and by implication the same sound, there is no need to tell them. This also means that the
teacher does not preempt the learners from saying what they could say by anticipating them
and saying it first, or by saying it in the teacher's way rather than by their own choice of
words. Then, when the teacher judges that a verbal hint is required, the same switch toggles
back to "on". Mastery of this technology consists in the teacher's growing sensitivity which
permits her to toggle off for increasingly longer periods of time and toggle on for the most
fugitive of moments.
Like the close-up in film, or the cursor on a computer screen, Gattegno used the technology of
the pointer to focus the learners' perceptions on a pinpoint, or a contrast between one point
and another, or the route through a sequence of points. Used in this way by Words in Color
teachers, the pointer is the tool which precisely exploits the students' powers of imagery and
intuition, analysis and synthesis, stressing and ignoring.
The truth of these claims cannot be tested by reading about Words in Color or
observing a single, sample lesson. A more extensive examination of the approach is
required, which may in part explain why so many educators have failed to see much
that is of value to them as result of their exposure to Words in Color.
The work on the charts is not confined to the decoding of individual, isolated words, as some
commentators on Gattegno's work have assumed. Through the use of the pointer, sequences
of words can be "tapped out" (Gattegno called this "visual dictation") and the learners can
supply the grouping, melody and intonation that join the words together in accordance with
the authentic sound of the language. In this way, decoding supports comprehension, as the
learners hear themselves "making sense" in terms of the language they already speak.
Many more advanced literacy activities are also supported by the charts, such as compiling
sets of words with similar or divergent meanings, using visual dictation to create sentences
that must be held in mind long enough to be transcribed accurately, writing creatively using
words from a particular chart or set of charts, locating examples of all of the possible
spellings of a particular sound or the possible sounds that can be spelled by using a particular
"letter", etc., etc. In fact, the charts should be viewed as a display, in its entirety, of the
language that the students are learning to read and write, whether it is English, French,
Spanish, Japanese, Lakota or any of the others for which Words in Color materials have been

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prepared. These flexible instruments can be applied to an endless stream of exercises and
activities, limited only by the teacher's creativity and ingenuity.
In all of these activities, there is a similar focus on the primacy of the learners' perception and
actions, whether the student or the teacher is holding the pointer. The "technology" functions
to trigger the activity and mental involvement of the learner, not to call attention to itself, to
supply answers or to entertain.
At the present time, the technology to outfit one classroom for Words in Color costs
approximately one hundred and fifty United States dollars. In the future perhaps, the same
resources will be supplied on a single computer disk or CD ROM, capable of display on a
screen or printout, for a much smaller sum. However, for the time being, durable cardboard
charts and collapsible metal pointers remain the most cost-effective and affordable mode of
delivery. Moreover, the same charts can be used with learners at any and every level, moved
easily from one location to another, and applied in combination with any other literacy
materials already in place.
As stated earlier, students and teachers often come to Words in Color with many of the same
preconceptions that educational software developers have. They too assume that learners need
to be entertained and that extensive explanations are necessary before engaging in any
activity. (Curiously enough, producers of game software, including the vastly successful
Nintendo games that swept the world during the late nineteen eighties and early nineties, tried
to make their activities as self-explanatory as possible so that players could join in
spontaneously without any advance preparation.) For this reason, they often express
resistance on seeing Words in Color for the first time. Further, many students expect to get
praise from their teachers when they get "the right answer" instead of developing their own
inner criteria for success in a particular game or activity. Teachers who want to work in the
spirit of Words in Color have to prepare themselves to resist telling and modeling, praising
and blaming.
To see an experienced Words in Color teacher in action and understand what he or she is
doing is difficult if one comes with certain preconceptions and biases. For example, a Words
in Color teacher might spend as much as a half-hour with a single student as that student
grappled with a particular sound in a word. It might appear that the teacher was not only
exposing the student to ridicule by his classmates but also making him suffer unnecessarily in
an effort to arrive at "what the teacher wanted". But the reality of the situation would be
different from the appearance. The instructor might know perfectly well that the student used
this word quite often in his everyday speech so that his ability to utter the appropriate sound
in the right place was never in doubt. The purpose was to get him to hear himself and know,
with certainty, what sound he was making and what word he was uttering at the moment that
he said it. The student's difficulty was not actually with the word itself, but his alienation from
the powers of listening that he had used in his initial acquisition of his native language and
was now struggling to regain. The instructor might also suspect that once the student had
become more connected with his own functioning as a speaker and listener through this kind
of focused work on one word, his progress would accelerate. It wouldn't be necessary for him
to work on every word this way. But if she just told him the answer in order to release the
tension and "get on with the lesson", an important opportunity to take that individual student
across an important threshold would be forfeited.
The technology of Words in Color - print on cardboard - is deceptively simple. The contents
of each of the twenty word charts have been carefully selected to illumine certain particular
aspects of the language. On the initial chart, for example, the complexities of the written form
of each target language have been reduced to a bare minimum so that the learners can focus
on the fundamental conventions of written expression in their own language: that there is an

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isomorphic relationship between speech and print, whereby the "time line" of sounds is
represented by the "straight line" of print; that each sound is represented by an arbitrary sign;
that the same sounds and signs can be endlessly rearranged to create additional words; that
some sounds have more than one possible sign and some signs may be used to represent more
than a single sound.
In the case of English, the first chart presents the learner with a highly restricted model of the
written language, in which only the five pure vowels and four consonant sounds are
represented and in which variant spellings occur only for the consonants and one vowel.
Further, only one consonant and one vowel are presented in two colors to suggest that a single
visual sign can be used for more than one sound. At first, the content of this chart appears to
many teachers and learners to be so limited as to be unworthy of serious attention. However,
those of us who work with adolescent and adult learners often find that our students become
confused when they try to pronounce these five vowels in isolation or when asked to reverse a
sequence of signs ("pot" > "top") or insert a sign in one word to transform it into another
("pat" > "past"). It's not that they don't "know" these simple words (in fact, they use them
every day of their lives). But they have no awareness from within themselves of how they
produce the sounds and with what inner movements such sounds are added, inserted,
substituted and reversed, through what Gattegno called "the transformation game". Patient
work on feeling the sounds from within and listening to oneself (not parroting the modeling of
the teacher) is necessary in order for the students to regain the mental and somatic flexibility
they once possessed as language learners and apply them to decoding words.
Many other features of the charts could be described, such as the way in which certain
features of each language that often lead to confusion are printed side-by-side to make fine
distinctions perceptible to the learners. It is even more important to note, however, another
aspect of the technology, which justifies Gattegno's claim that an "entire language" is
contained within each set of charts. Although what is printed on the charts is necessarily
static, it becomes dynamic through the use of the pointer and hand gestures by both teacher
and students. Through these means, every single sign and word on any of the charts can be
"moved" and connected to any others. Indeed, any verbal statement that can be made in the
target language can thus be "tapped out" on the charts.
Gattegno writings on literacy cover a wealth of topics which are beyond the scope of this
paper, including the extensions of reading and writing beyond decoding and encoding within
the limits of a learner's spoken language across many more advanced thresholds. In addition
to the Charts, Words in Color utilizes black and white print technology (books, worksheets,
pamphlets, etc.) so that learners can use reading and writing as instruments for vocabulary
enrichment, creative expression and the acquisition and transmission of knowledge through
texts. Teachers who are committed to this approach not only work with their students to
become aware of their own linguistic powers but also to discover and exploit a broad range of
mental and somatic functionings which are essential supports for literacy such as the
following: the power to stress and ignore within one's perceptions; inner voice and imagery;
body imagery; questioning; self-monitoring. All of these are approached through practical
exercises which obviate the need for verbal explanation and prescription.
Words in Color has been adopted by teachers of literacy in many different native languages,
and in many countries throughout all of the world's continents except Antarctica. It is used by
teachers of children, adolescents and adults, and by those who teach beginning readers as well
as those responsible for remedial classes, literature, reading and writing for professional
purposes and so on. Those teachers who have remained committed to the approach over a
number of years find it to be very effective across the widest spectrum of learners. But Words
in Color cannot claim to have become popular in any country or language. This state of affairs
has certainly been due to a number of factors: its difference from other approaches; the

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demands that it makes on teachers to prepare themselves; the almost total absence of Words
in Color from the curricula of teacher preparation programs during the past thirty years; and
misleading and unfavorable accounts of Gattegno's work in the professional literature during
his lifetime. At present, Words in Color is virtually unknown to most scholars, innovators and
practitioners at the same time that they are actively seeking literacy solutions based on
technology. This is unfortunate, since Gattegno developed an approach to literacy that makes
use of an affordable technology that is within the capacity of every school system in the world
to purchase and implement. Furthermore, it builds on the universal powers of learners and
puts them, rather than the technology itself, at the center. It is all too easy for educators,
especially in under funded schools and systems of education, to stress the resources they lack,
particularly in the area of educational technology, and to ignore what they have: learners who
are ready and able to learn if what is done in the classroom truly respects them.
Finally, brief mention must be made of Gattegno's use of intermediate and "high technology"
for use with Words in Color. Using first video and then computer technology, Gattegno
developed new materials to complement the charts and pointer towards the end of his life.
Due to their scarcity and relatively higher expense, these videos and computer disks have not
been used extensively by teachers already committed to the approach. If properly transferred
to CD ROM or other current technologies, these programs might be utilized as an alternative
to the kinds of edutainment mentioned above. In any case, Caleb Gattegno pointed a way for
other educators to follow. He demonstrated that technologies can be invented for the
acquisition and enhancement of literacy, which respect the powers of human learners. Nor is
it necessary or desirable to take entertainment as our model for what a truly humane
technology for learning should and can be.
Bibliography
Bill Bernhardt and Rose Ortiz. "Isolating Consonants: Lifelong Impediment to Reading".
Journal of College Reading 1 (1994), 21-26
Caleb Gattegno.The Common Sense of Teaching Reading and Writing. New York:
Educational Solutions, 1985
Caleb Gattegno. "The Problem of Reading is Solved". Harvard Educational Review 40
(1970), 283-286
Caleb Gattegno. Teaching Reading with Words in Color. New York: Educational Solutions,
1967
Caleb Gattegno and Dorothea Hinman. "Words in Color - The Morphologico-Algebraic
Approach to Teaching Reading". In The Disabled Reader: Education of the Dyslexic Child.
Ed. John Money. Baltimore, Maryland: The John Hopkins Press, 1966, Ch. 11.
© William Bernhardt The College of Staten Island, City University of New York
The Science of Education in Questions - N° 15 - February 1997
"Words in Color as an Appropriate Technology" by William Bernhardt is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.