History of Words in Color
Words in Color dates back to 1957 when a psychologist and scientist named Caleb Gattegno was invited to join a United Nations mission in Ethiopia.The mission was to improve the literacy rate, which at the time was under 10 per cent – putting Ethiopia's education system at the bottom among African nations.
When he arrived, the city of Addis Ababa was shut down for Christmas. During this 48-hour period, he taught himself how to read the local language. He couldn't hold a conversation, but he could read every sign on the street. When he discovered it is supposed to take 18 months to teach Amharic, he decided to test his method on others. Gattegno had illiterate ministry employees in their 50s and 60s reading newspapers within six hours. These experiments were the first hints of the Words in Color approach.
Gattegno achieved these remarkable results by analyzing the language and identifying all of the spoken sounds. He then located the sounds in the Amharic alphabet, consisting of 251 signs, and arranged signs with the same sound in columns. By doing this, the learner did not have to memorize each sign in order to read it. Although it is unclear if he was able to color the sounds at this point, he had made his first Fidel - which Gattegno named after the Ethiopian word for alphabet.
After he left the UN mission in 1958, he decided to work on the Spanish language. He tested his Spanish charts in Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Spain in 1959, and discovered that he could teach language like nobody else on Earth. His techniques and materials achieved in a few hours what other literacy approaches took months or years to do.
Gattegno saw English and French as special challenges because individual sounds can have so many spellings. He wasn't positive that a successful Fidel could be created for English, but he had to try. The first English Words in Color charts were released in 1962. These charts looked much different than the ones we recognize today. There were fewer sounds on the Fidel, no two-colored diphthongs, and the words themselves were different.
In 1977, Gattegno released his revised charts. This time around, he organized the Fidel more logically – first with short vowels, then long vowels, then diphthongs. By this time he had created charts for so many languages that he was able to compile a nearly universal color scheme. For example, red would sound as the "ee" in "see" in every language.
Gattegno travelled the world demonstrating his approach to teaching reading and writing, and wrote books and articles on the topic until his death in 1988.
