Teacher Discussion Forums

The idea is at www.geocities.com/carjug . It is a vowel sound color-code designed to help people with reading trouble.

I don't know anything about ESL teaching, so I don't know what to ask, or how to ask it. An internet friend, Eve Englebrite, suggested posting here because English is a difficult language to read, and my website might be useful to you guys.

English is the hardest language on the planet to read. It has borrowed words, and spelling systems from dozens of other languages, and most of the most common words follow no logical spelling scheme. The vowel sound spellings are the worst offenders, with over 500 variants* My little project uses 14 colors to remedy this situation.

Any feedback on using this website as a ESL tool or as a remedial reading tool will be appreciated, especially if you have had any reading or language problems in the past.

Thanx, Chris Bogardus, 828-406-9580 [email protected]

*Quiche, snowplow, who, what, where, one two, four, eight, a, the. All these words have illogical spellings.

Hi Chris, and welcome to the forums!

Sorry, but I have to say almost straight away that the range and distinctness of the colours is a little too limited/muted/much of a muchness, not easy on the eyes - it seems hard to quickly and confidently tell exactly which pronunciation is being indicated, so it's difficult therefore to fully analyse your system (for accuracy, consistency etc) and thereby offer an unreservedly positive opinion of it. But even when I'm fairly sure, I'm sometimes still a bit puzzled at the sounds you've chosen: for example, the phoneme represented by the keyword Bud (^ in IPA), as in the first syllable of 'color' in your page's title ('The Vowel Sounds in Color'), also appears to be a substitute for/approximation of schwa (as in the word 'The' in the same title), whilst the second syllable of that 'color' appears to be "er"//3:/as in Bird, which really is a bit strange/prolonged to my British ear! But then, I guess that the difference between schwa and 3: if both are ended with rhotic "r" isn't actually that great, and that only rabid phoneticians would quibble about any sounds possibly being only approximately rather than exactingly represented, and/or perhaps doubling for others. (Apologies if I have misunderstood your system - I don't know enough about American English (varieties of ~), and I am not much of a phonetician generally!).

Generally, I think it would help if you explicitly indicated how phonemes like schwa and a: (which don't appear in your limited key of only 14 vowel sound-colours) are represented (or rather, approximated), rather than leaving the user to work them out (from apparent sets like 'the', welcome' and 'a', and 'hard' and 'are', respectively), and it might be an idea to have an IPA key at the top in addition to the key letters (even though those letters may well be the most frequent for the sound), with the letters and IPA then aligned directly above each keyword.

Other apparent problems that I can see in e.g. the opening welcoming paragraph include the lack of a representation of /j/ in the first syllable of 'useful', and the somewhat questionable (American?) renderings of 'what', 'where', 'because' (bi:... or b1..., by the way? Too many long vowels and the words will start to sound strange - elongated and isolated - even when read aloud rather than "truly spoken" in connected speech), and possibly 'cause', etc; again, the limitations of the palette can make it hard to be immediately sure exactly what pronunciation is being suggested (and one may not be convinced even when one is pretty sure of what is being suggested colour-wise! But again, maybe only rabid phoneticians would object to any possible slight differences in analysis and resulting "transcription").

I think that ultimately I would prefer (as a teacher if not a student) to at least initially use more explicit listings of phonemes<>spellings (see for example the Collins COBUILD English Guides 8: Spelling), not to mention the IPA as used in pretty dependable learner dictionaries (i.e. your system isn't really teaching anything), but sure, the sort of stuff you've developed could well help in making the transition from isolated words and/or IPA-aided decoding of texts (digraphia, more or less) to reading the standard orthography completely unassisted, so thanks for sharing it!

Probably the next question from those who might really like the look of it is, is there or will there be a way to upload (to your site) and/or convert (using software) machine-readable document files, so that whatever material one likes can be read using your colouring scheme?