Effectiveness of Words in Color
Interview with a Words in Color User
Name: Rose Katz Ortiz
Occupation: Associate Professor Emeritus of English
When were you introduced to Gattegno's approach?
I was introduced to Dr. Gattegno and to his approach in 1969.
How long have you been using this approach?
I have used the approach formally from 1969 to 2005 and informally from 1969 to the present. Once having begun to practice the Subordination of Teaching to Learning, I found myself employing the attitude of the approach in most situations, both professional and personal.
Tell us about a remarkable transformation you have seen in someone using the approach.
The journey from "not reading" to "reading" is magnified when the road is bumpy or when it doesn’t happen easily. Most of my teaching experience involved working teenagers and adults who hadn’t learned to read with comprehension or who when stumped by unfamiliar words would quit reading. I also was present when my own children were learning to read, and I provided assistance when they asked. Following are reports of two experiences of using Dr. Gattegno’s Words in Color (WIC) approach that left a lasting impression on me.
1. Norberto
Norberto, a ninth grader, spoke both Spanish and English. He said he could read some words in Spanish, but that he didn’t do much reading. When he read in English, it was haltingly, a few words at time. Although he wanted to read, he didn’t think he’d ever learn to do it well. It was his attitude that the ones who were born smart could read well, and the others couldn’t. And if they hadn’t learned by the time they had reached 9th grade, they wouldn’t.
He was an artist. While quite reserved, he managed to show his curiosity about what was happening in the Reading classroom. The alternative school where we met permitted students to move in and out of classes and to determine where they’d spend their time and for how long. Norberto flirted with the Reading classroom before finally settling in. He was attracted by the color charts. He watched other students working and then asked, to confirm his hypothesis, whether the colors had something to do with the sounds. By observing, Norberto discovered the key to decoding the words on the charts.
His curiosity and artistic interests drove him to his next set of questions. Why are the words arranged as they are? They don’t connect. I took out my pointer and tapped out: “Pat sat up.” I then handed him the pointer and asked him to tap what I had tapped. He tapped “pat.. sat.. up.” As he tapped, he said each word one after another with a two or three second pause in between. I asked him to repeat what he said. His answer was, “I didn’t say anything.” I asked him to tap the words again. He did, again as the first time, he said one after another pausing in between, This time I asked him to tap but not to say the words until he finished tapping. He did that, but once again he said them haltingly, one word after another “as words” not as a sentence that conveyed an idea.
At that point, I thought to ask him to make a drawing that would show the meaning of what he had tapped. It was only then that he, without my asking, tapped again but this time he didn’t look at me but instead kept his eyes on the charts and moved the pointer faster. Then he smiled. That’s when I could tell that he “read” the words he had tapped. I handed him the chalk and he drew two pictures, one of a girl slouching in a chair, the other of a girl sitting up. Above the drawing he wrote, “Pat sat up.”
Norberto hadn’t yet taken a notebook to keep a journal. He said he couldn’t read so he’d have nothing to write about in a reading journal. After his “Pat sat up.” experience, I suggested that he take a journal. I asked him to tap other sentences and to draw pictures to convey their meaning. This, I said, he could do in a journal. Norberto took a notebook from the shelf. Working alone, Norberto sat with his eyes fixed on the charts and his head moving as if following a bouncing ball. He wrote sentence after sentence and drew pictures that illustrated what he wrote.
He also borrowed a copy of Words in Color Book 2*, which has lists of sentences that incorporate words introduced on successive Words in Color charts. In the weeks that followed, he drew pictures for 104 sentences. Each page of his notebook looked like a comic strip with a number of drawings. Most included more than one picture per sentence to accurately depict the action and to provide context or justification for it. The drawings became more detailed. The sentences, he said, required explanation for why someone would say them.
For the sentence, “He broke his promise,” Norberto drew a man kneeling on one knee with his hands clasped in prayer position in front of a woman. The caption above the stick-firgured man’s head read, “Will you ‘married’ me?” The one above the woman’s head read, “Yes, ok.” The caption below the man read, “I’ll meet you at the church at 8 :00. “ The second picture depicted a church with the bride at the door, the caption above read, “8 :00,” the drawing showed the man running away from the church.
After the first 77 sentences, Norberto moved from printing to script. He also changed his manner of dress. His hair was combed and slicked with gel, and he carried a briefcase. One day he stopped drawing pictures in his journal. He said, now I’ll read a “real book.”
*Words in Color Book 2 has been replaced by Words in Color R2.
2. Diego
At six years of age, my son, in first grade at the time cried because he thought he’d never learn to read. It was his perception that learning to read would require memorizing all the words in the language. As it was, he was having trouble remembering the words his teacher had assigned.
Until that point, I had decided to let my children’s teachers do the teaching, and I would provide any help my children requested. Seeing Diego so unhappy and under this misconception about reading, I took a more active role. I asked him if he were willing to spend five minutes a day for one week working with me on reading. After some negotiation about setting a timer and putting up charts in his bedroom, he agreed.
We began with one sound, “a” as in “at.” I wrote the sound in beige on the chalkboard side of his easel. I told him the sound, tapped it with the pointer, and asked him to say it as many times as he saw or heard me tap it. I then asked him to write it, also as many times as I tapped it. If I tapped twice and hesitated then tapped twice again, he was expected to write: “aa aa,” which he did. In our first five minute lesson, all we did was “play” with “a.” He read and wrote until the timer sounded. All of his writing was in pencil on his pad.
On the next day, I introduced “u” as in “up,” which I wrote in yellow adding to “a,” which remained on the board from the previous day. I tapped, and he read and wrote: “u uu uuu,” then “au, aauu, aua.” Sometimes instead of tapping, I asked him to reverse the sounds. By the third day, I added “i” as in “it,” which I wrote in pink chalk, “e,” as in “pet,” in blue chalk, and “o” as in “pot,” in white chalk. When the five minutes timer sounded, he could read, “auieo, oiueo, aaiieu,” or any other variation.
In the next days, I added the following consonants: “p” as in “pat;” “t” as in “top;” its variant spelling “tt,” as in “putt;” then in green: “s” as in “sit,” “ss” as in “pass,” and in purple: “s” as in “is.”
By the seventh day, we had worked for thirty-five minutes altogether. During that time, Diego had worked with and could read words and sentences that comprised different combinations and permutations of 9 sounds: five vowels and four consonants. For three of the consonants, he also learned variant spellings, such as “’s” as in “Pat’s,” and “ss” as in “pass.” He could read the 36 words on chart 1 of the 20Words in Color charts including “puppet” and “asset,” and by adding “-s” or “’s” totaled more words. He also could tap out and write any sentence using the words on that chart. From the beginning, I communicated to him, usually by pointing only, when he made mistakes, and I let him know that I’d wait for him to correct them. Yet, he would often say, « Don’t tell me ! » Then he would smile, knowing that I wouldn’t.
In the weeks that followed, Diego asked that we put up more charts until all 20 WIC charts covered the walls of his bedroom.
It took some time before he felt confident that he’d learn to read books, but he knew that he had crossed an essential threshold and that reading did not require “memorizing” words, but “reading” them. I too crossed a threshold, “as his teacher,” I saw for myself how in a relatively short time, a non-reader could become a reader.
What keeps you interested in the approach?
What keeps me interested and has kept me interested in the approach for more than four decades are both the materials and the way of working. I work mainly with the Words in Color materials, which because of their and organization and use of color have the potential to visually convey to learners without much teacher explanation the spellings of English with their many variations and ambiguities, thus making word decoding reachable through independent activity and in a most economical way. Because of their elegance and completeness, and the possibilities they provide for endless story invention and spelling games, I continually find the materials engaging and instructive.
As most of my work has been with high school and college students who had difficulty decoding and/or reading with comprehension, another appeal is that the materials are open-ended enough to accommodate the interests of students of all ages. There are no pictures on the charts or in the primers. The imagery is supplied by the readers. While younger learners may see “Sam” as eight years of age, older ones may see him as thirty-five, depending on the context and situation.
What I find compelling in the way of working is that it focuses on learning, learning for the students and for their teachers. To work in the spirit of the approach, I try to remain in contact with what the learners’ are doing and to base my next moment’s activities on the previous ones. These attempts encourage me to « be in the moment ,» responsive to whatever presents itself. As a teacher, I am responsible for providing learning opportunities, and I find that I do so best by learning from my students what their progress requires. Working in this way challenges me to become as familiar as possible with the demands of what I’m teaching and with the materials. It also calls upon me to be watchful, attentive, self-reflective, discerning, and creative.
My work with Dr. Caleb Gattegno’s approach to teaching has kept me in contact with a extraordinary community of educators who share experiences and who acknowledge the essentialness to learning of recognizing and maintaining respect for the powers of learners.
