The Words in Color approach to teaching reading integrates decoding skills with comprehension from the earliest stages of learning. Students are challenged to analyze decoded words and sentences in relation to their own experiences with language. Even when decoding simple sounds, students can discuss possible speakers and contexts. As students create sentences, they evaluate word order and idioms based on their own sense of correct English usage. The approach also emphasizes attending to the rhythm, melody and meaning of language from the beginning. Students experiment with voicing sentences in different tones to imply various moods and situations. Through decoding ambiguous sentences, students must make inferences about implied contexts and meanings.

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How Words in Color Integrates “Breaking
the Written Code of English” with
Comprehension - Paula Hajar
Among the arguments often used against decoding approaches to teaching is the contention
that decoding, in its attention to graphemic and phonemic patterns, decontextualizes words,
sentences and other utterances, and strips reading of meaning. Those who teach reading by
Caleb Gattegno’s Words in Color approach contend that quite the opposite can be true: that,
in fact, even in the earliest stages of learning to decode, students who use Words in Color are
constantly challenged to analyze the expressions they are decoding against their own life
experiences with language. “Who might say this?” and “In what kind of situations?” are
questions that are brought to bear on even the simplest decodings. Such conversations are
possible, in fact, even when students are just beginning to decode vowel sounds, such as the
diphthongs “down”, “sigh” or “oh”. Even at this level, students can create variations in
tonality that suggest a variety of persons, situations, moods, and motivations for a given
expression. And once the student is able to read a syllable (that is, a vowel sound either
followed or preceded by a consonant), then meaning-making is a possible part of every
subsequent learning-to-read activity, even if it is only to comment on whether something that
has been decoded is really “English” or not. Matching attentiveness to meaning with
attentiveness to the demands of decoding permeates Words in Color practice. Another typical
beginning exercise is for students to look at the Words in Color charts (each of which is an
array of words whose connections are not only phonetic and graphemic but also occasionally
grammatical) and to find words that could stand alone as meaningful utterances in common
vernacular speech, and then to propose various cases in which such utterance would be
appropriate. One easy example is imperatives (“Sit!”, “Stop!”) or exclamations (“Pop!”,
“Yes!”, “Fun!”). Alternatively, students can look at one-word utterances as answers, and then
create possible questions for them. For example, if the answer is “Pam”, the question might be
“Who’s absent today?” or “Who gave you that?”.
The focus on context can also become a focus on usage. As students graduate to creating
multi-word sentences and they can experiment with word order and idiom, all the while their
own experiences (and therefore their own sense of truth) to evaluate whether something
“sounds right”, asking, “Is this English?” and then “Whose English is it?” In this way they
continually engage in the critical examination of their own language and the various ways it is
used, as they do in speaking the language they know, but also critically, much as a linguist or
cultural anthropologist might. Thus even though the restrictions on what they are reading are
initially quite tight, the learners need not sacrifice sophistication in their discussion of what is
being read. The Words in Color approach also stresses early attention to the melody of
language. Using this approach, even the most neophyte of readers will not fall into the trap of
reading in the monotone we have come to associate with the efforts of an early decoder, and
which surely strips reading of meaning. From the beginning of the decoding process, students
are explicitly encouraged to attend to the rhythm and meter (and thus by definition, the sense)
of what they read. In fact, as soon as they begin to decode words of more than one vowel,
students learn about the schwa, or unaccented vowel. Initially teachers will give students the
“beat” of a word, using a rap of the ruler or their own fingertips tapping on a desk or the wall;
students develop their own aural acuity and their familiarity with the spoken language to
judge for themselves whether they are pronouncing a word correctly. In this way they avoid
the traps of pronouncing words in accents that bear no relation to the spoken language as they

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know it.
When they graduate from decoding words to decoding sentences, students can use among
their criteria for correctness the melody of the sentence: the rise of the voice for a question,
the pause that is marked by a comma, the changes in tone that are inherent in the direct
quotation or the imperative — all of which they must attend to as part of the early decoding
process. The teacher’s tapping fingers or ruler can guide them, as they bring to their own
awareness that one property of language is melody, and that as speakers of the language they
already have criteria for melodic correctness. Because they are relying on their expertise as
native speakers, they can avoid later difficulties that crop up with a mechanical approach that
focuses exclusively on phonemic correctness (without the attention to melody).
Students who are at the decoding stage also can experiment with the many ways a single
sentence can be voiced, and how they can create mood, character and even situation through
intonation and inflection. In his book The Common Sense of Teaching Reading and Writing,
Gattegno develops this theme through the suggestion of an exercise in which decoders
experiment with these variations in intonation to say the same sentence “softly, irritatedly, as
a warning, as a caress, as a prayer, shouting as if to request stopping, jokingly, frightened, as
if exhausted”. (p. 89)
Another of the games Gattegno suggests, one that works on character and role, has students
use the Words in Color charts to create sentences that might have been said by different types
of people, for example, something said by a jealous person, something said by a kind person,
something else said by an elderly person, by a young child, an invalid, a guest, a host, etc. The
sentences students create can be comic, somber, angry, or factual; but students have to draw
on their experiences, intuition, and insights to create these sentences.
A third game played by students working on comprehension as they work on decoding
sentences involves imagining a sentence as part of a larger text, and then imagining the rest of
the text — what came before and what might come after. Again, context-creation and
attention to narrative can (and should) follow close on the heels of decoding.
Yet another exercise that is sophisticated but becomes quite common even in the early stages
of decoding, is for students to discuss inference, which arises when sentences are ambiguous.
A few examples can illustrate. Using only charts three, four and five, the teacher could
visually dictate (point to the words silently with a pointer) the sentence, “Then Daddy landed
on the dusty tent” and then engage students in a line of inquiry about the various meanings of
“landed”. What were Dad’s activities just prior to “landing”? (Was he flying a plane? Making
the forty-yard dash from a nearby playing field? Tripping over the tent poles?)
Or using charts one, two and three, the teacher could visually dictate the sentence “Mom
sniffed at Sam’s pants” and ask the questions: Why did Mom do that? Who was Sam to her?
Was he her baby who might need a diaper change? Her husband, whom she suspected of
breaking a promise not to go to a smoky bar after work? Her son whose laundry she was
collecting? And so forth.
Because such sentences imply off-stage as much as they explicate the action on stage, they are
a good stimulus to student-made illustrations. These drawings can show the “whole story”,
serving as indications of the extent to which what the students have read has engaged their
imaginations.
Because of the challenge of working within restrictions (typically students are restricted to a
certain array of words on the charts, and/or to a particular mood or character), beginning
students find themselves less often engaged in describing their own experience, which has
become a primary focus of several versions of the whole language method of learning to read
and write. Rather, they must use their imaginations to locate a bridge from themselves to

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environment outside of themselves, as they know it. Thus, in the way it challenges the reader
to look outward, it is a more social way of learning to read and write, though self and personal
experience and knowledge are, from the beginning, identified as a student's most basic tools
for reading and interpreting these created texts.
By adding to its focus on decoding skills the emphases on melody, inflection and intonation,
three technical aspects of reading that are often neglected by other approaches, the Words in
Color approach drives home the point that, because they allow the reader to imply and infer,
contextualize, and create ground for anticipation, those aspects of reading are key to
comprehension. Melody, inflection and intonation are, in the end, what give students the
tools, opportunities and habits of connecting the words on the page, however simple in the
beginning, to their experiences with life, and with language usage. It is in this way that a
method of teaching reading such as Words in Color that ostensibly emphasizes decoding
skills, also supports the meaning-making emphasis that is the hallmark of other approaches.
Bibliography
Gattegno, Caleb. The Common Sense of Teaching Reading and Writing. (1982) New York:
Educational Solutions, 1982.
© Paula Hajar Teachers College, Columbia University
The Science of Education in Questions - N° - 15 February 1997
"How Words in Color Integrates “Breaking the Written Code of English” with
Comprehension" by Paula Hajar is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.