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Caleb Gattegno's Words in Colour
Suzanne Lachaise
(A talk given during the conference “Neuropsychology Applied to Communication”
organized by the University of Besançon - Department of Audiophonology of the Faculty of
Medicine and Pharmacy)
Preamble
I only have an hour to speak to you about Words in Color. It would take at least 12 hours or
even 20 to give you a really complete outline - and even that would not be a training session.
So I have had to choose what is most likely give you a sufficient idea, though very
incomplete, about the basis and the content of this concept. There will be very few examples
of exercises in this talk and you will have to take my word about how efficient such and such
an exercise is, or just not take any heed at all of what I have to say. It is your right, and my
aim is not to convert you but to inform you of the existence of the thinking and the work of
Dr. Caleb Gattegno. I hope I will misrepresent him as little as possible, but he alone could say
if I have (and he won’t because he died in July 1988).
In general, I have not used quotation marks around quotes taken from the author; please
consider that I have tried to express his thinking as I have integrated it to this day.
Background
Words in Colour was created in 1957 while C. Gattegno was in Ethiopia as a technical
advisor for UNESCO trying to resolve the problems of illiteracy there. It is an approach based
on knowledge from the inside of the intrinsic functionings of human beings and on an
integrating, “multi point of view” of the field of experience in question, here reading.
The answers proposed by this approach are all based on the necessity of solving real,
technical learning problems in teaching situations - and not on theoretical reflection about
reading.
The Powers of the Learner
The most important element is the role reserved for the learner. Each of us is endowed with
powerful equipment which it is more efficient to use than to ignore. Each student comes to
class with his experience, with his intuition, his intelligence, his creativity, his aptitude to
generate mental images and to act upon them, to create mental structures, to foresee
(anticipate), to use his will, his common sense, his curiosity and his need to learn, to use his
perceptions, his capacity for action, his aptitude to change his point of view, to make

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transfers, to generalize, to formulate, to accentuate certain aspects while voluntarily ignoring
others (that is to say to abstract), to give himself criteria of truth, to suspend judgement, to
mobilize his affectivity and to use what he already knows how to do to meet the unknown at
each new instant, etc ... Having recognized all these powers at work in children in their cribs,
we can hardly deny their existence in our students, children or adults, even if they no longer
use them spontaneously and consciously. One of the roles of the teacher is to provide
exercises which are destined to reactivate these powers.
Attentive observation of very young children in the lighting of Gattegno's work makes us
realize that games are one of the most serious activities there are. Therefore, another thing we
can count on to be the right thing to do is to present work in the form of games that present a
challenge. Among other things, this avoids searching in vain for how to “motivate” our
students. They motivate themselves when they come in contact with the challenge. Their need
to co-operate in order to solve the problem overrides any competition. (This is not just an idea
but also a fact of experience. It has been observed in practice.)
The second element is reading itself, its specificity, its history and its characteristics. Dr.
Gattegno trained as a mathematician and as such, he directed his particular attention towards
aspects which had been missed by preceding authors of methods or pedagogical concepts. The
principle of economy, the notion of transfer, the awareness of the algebraic dimension of
spoken languages came from this particular vision. I would remind you that this took place in
1957.
What’s more, he had to treat the problems of reading simultaneously in many languages, very
different from one another, like Hindi, Amharic (a vernacular language of Ethiopia), Arabic,
Hebrew, European languages (Spanish, English, French). Out of this diversity came the idea
of arbitrary languages for the very beginning of language learning, in order to deal with what
is universal, and therefore human, before dealing with what is specific to one language or
another, therefore cultural.
The prerequisites for learning to read, as it is described here, are to be a sighted person and to
have learned to speak one’s mother tongue. “The conquest of the spoken language is more
difficult by far than that of learning to read...” Most illiterate people speak their language as
well as many ‘literate’ (i.e. having learned to read and write) people do. If they are non-
readers, either it is because they have not had the opportunity to learn to read (as is still the
case in many countries), or their teachers have not known how to create conditions favourable
to their learning. “To learn to read is easy, all that has to be done is to transfer the powers
acquired while learning how to speak the language to its new form which is the written
language.”
It is not a question of conditioning but of a set of functionings put into motion by the person
who is learning in order to answer the particular challenges of the learning experience.
Dr. Gattegno attempted to make the elements of the written language and the relationships
between the spoken language and the written language directly perceptible. The use of colour
is one of the means he found to do it and the one which gives its name to the set of material
invented for those learning to read.
I would like to add a word about comprehension and memory before going on to describe the
approach in more detail.
Comprehension is not taught through reading. Children acquire comprehension while learning
to speak and transfer it to the written language.
As for memory, its role in learning to read can be very small if we are vigilant: in Amharic,
there are 241 signs and to learn them through memorization in traditional teaching takes 18

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months. But if, instead of trying to have students retain these 241 symbols in succession, we
notice that there are basic forms and a law of composition, then instead of calling upon
memory alone, we can henceforth call upon the student’s intelligence and initiative. This is
the work that C. Gattegno did for that language through the rediscovery of the law of
composition and by rendering it perceptible with the use of colours. (The consonants and the
vowels each have a sign. The direct syllables are represented by one sign whose top half is
coloured to represent the corresponding consonant and bottom half the associated vowel. The
consonant/colour for “b” is dark green and the vowel/colour for “a” is white, so the sign for
“ba” would be green on the top half and white on the bottom.)� Perceiving the sameness of
the colour and the consistency of the information, I, a person learning to read, can reinvent the
correct form for each syllable as often as I need to if I have memorized the minimum
indispensable. Through practice, retention takes place, and if I retain, it is for ever, whereas I
can forget what I try to memorize. (Just as I have retained and not memorized my mother
tongue.)
Incidentally, the difference that there is between memory and retention sheds light on why
traditional vocabulary lessons do not allow students to augment their linguistic knowledge...
Algebra
In all spoken languages, we use a limited number of sounds and tones to generate an infinite
number of words and expressions (in French there are only 33 sounds - or 34?). But no one
knows how many words there are in French and we do not need to know for we go on
creating new ones because the number of combinations of these 33 sounds is, if not infinite, at
least big enough for us never to use them all. It is algebra which permits this, and algebra does
not belong to language or to reading - it is a characteristic functioning of the human mind;
language is a human creation so this power is integral to it. (Some examples: “lune” has just
one more sound than “une”, “malle” and “lame” are the inversion one of the other, we can
make “lia” from “la” by inserting a sound, “poule” becomes “roule” or “pâle” or “pousse” by
substitution.) The algebra in question here is not quite the same algebra we learn at school. It
is the functional algebra that babies experiment with in their cribs without their parents
knowing (parents are quite happy that their children are so well behaved and so amusing
when they play like this!).
This algebra permits us to understand another aspect of learning that Gattegno introduced:
doing much with a little. Another role of the teacher is to reduce the “little” (to memorize, to
know, to master) as much as possible and not to limit the “much” to his own vision of things.
(If I find three solutions to a problem, my students may find more.)
For a given language, all the different possible combinations have not been retained as part of
the language but they remain conceivable so we first work in the domain of what is
conceivable and our judgement as students allows us to extract from this collection -which we
create in the same way as our ancestors created our language- what conforms to our language.
This gives the sense of relativity: I become aware of my creative powers and my right to use
them but at the same time I know that I do not have the power to change the language of my
environment because it was there before me. I submit to it through comprehension and not
through conditioning. What is more, this intimate knowledge of what linguistic creation is
opens me to the fact that my language is only one of all the languages possible and prepares
me to accept what others have done in this field. (This is one of the aspects of what it is to
teach inhabitants of the earth rather than inhabitants of France.)
We do not have to do this activity for a very long time, but it needs to be done at the
beginning of the learning process.
The Conventions of Reading as the Bases for Learning

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Historically, all languages were created, improved, transformed orally well before being
established in a written form. Those of our ancestors who set themselves the task of doing the
transcribing, all had to solve the same kinds of difficulties. The answers they found
demonstrate human creativity and provide an inventory of those things possible in the field of
investigation defined by the problem.
▪ Thus, they all had to take into account the fact that transcribing requires something to write
on, and therefore spatial organization, and everyone has organized the written word on
a straight line (from left to right, or from right to left or from top to bottom but always
on a line). They all did this because in all known civilizations, the spoken language is
in time, with a beginning, what follows and an end, and time is irreversible. Only a
straight line permits restitution of this order and this irreversibility once the point of
departure has been decided upon (we say now that the unfolding of time and linear
order are “homomorphic spaces”). The fact of teaching this as of the first session and
maintaining it as one of the bases of this learning permits, among other things, the
avoidance of the development of different forms of dyslexia.
▪ A second convention is due to the fact that what we write on is not infinite either and at a
certain moment we reach the edge of the page. Where do we go then? In French our
writing follows from top to bottom in space after having followed from left to right.
▪ The third convention is that each sound which is recognized as being different must be
associated with at least one different sign. Turkish, Spanish, Italian, Japanese are
languages which are almost written phonetically, French much less so. That is why we
have to solve the problem of equivalent spellings - one part of the material for Words
in Colour is designed for that purpose.
▪ The fourth convention is that we leave a space between written words even though there is
no space between them when we speak. (There are no spaces left between words in
written Thai.)
▪ And finally, words are written on the line (and some letters go below it).
These conventions comprise what Gattegno calls the Level Zero, L0, because the
characteristics of French are studied, but without bringing in the limitations created by dealing
with French vocabulary. This work takes 4 or 5 sessions, rarely more, and is done with 5
vowels, each presented with only one spelling and also with the colour that is associated with
it. With just one vowel “a” we can already explore the correspondence sound-sign, linearity
and irreversibility, the separation between “words” or the pseudo words that we can construct
with so little raw material and thus practically no burden on memory. As soon as we introduce
a second vowel, “u” for example, the combinative possibilities become much more
perceptible and permit algebraic games that children appreciate very much (it is difficult to
stop them once the game has got going!).
The introduction of 3 other vowels permits the teacher to be sure that the techniques already
put in place have been mastered, transfers made and all the algebraic operations that function
in language (addition and its particular form, insertion, inversion and substitution) are used.
When the children arrive at this stage, they have “studied”, experimented and mastered the
groundwork that reading French requires. The teacher has had the occasion to become aware
of the particular problems that one or other of the students may have and to deal with them
before meaning, spelling and social pressure interfere with their learning. The children do not
have the impression that they know how to read, they play with the sounds and their written
representations, and through doing this, they create the mental structures suited to the
universe into which they are entering.
Whether this work has been done in ½ an hour or 4 hours (the teacher is responsible for
deciding when to move on), the children are now ready to move on to the second phase, L1,
where they must progressively take into account the French language, and where the

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consonants are introduced, not as isolated sounds but as modifiers of the vowels. What the
children draw from this is how a new sign modifies the vowel which accompanies it. If they
do this, they can transfer this modification to the other vowels they know and they have a new
functioning at their disposal. It is this functioning which is transferable, whereas the manner
which each consonant affects the vowels remains arbitrary as long as the consonant has not
been studied (or its influence deduced through the students’ own initiative).
At this level, the building blocks of learning to read are established - on the one hand the
vowels alone, and on the other the syllables. Because of the fact that consonants are not
introduced as isolated sounds, children do not stumble; they read groupings they can deal with
as if they were at level L0, what they produce is complex and for the most part sounds French.
Part of the work done at this level is to decide whether what is produced is French or not; the
children have the power to do this for spoken French and the teacher for written.
As soon as they begin to make words in French, they can do with them what was done with
the vowels, and then with the “building blocks”, that is, make proposals which are correct
according to the criteria of the language. As of the second or third day, comprehension
becomes indissociable from the act of reading.
In the material, the first chart and the first reading booklet are for level L1; to explore it we
need only 4 consonants in addition to the 5 vowels already studied but also multiple spellings
for the sound used. From the beginning, we are dealing with the complexity of the language
but in the context of a restricted universe so that memorization does not become an obstacle
and so that retention takes place as a result of active practice and permanent toing and froing
between what is said and what is written.
At the end of this step, the children have mastered the technique of reading: they read fluently
at normal speed without stumbling and with the necessary intonation. What’s more, most of
them are capable of taking initiatives and continuing their learning alone, only asking for help
for what is arbitrary - new colours for new signs - and even this they can often deduce from
observing the charts.
The next step, L2, is just a continuation of L1 and permits the students to practise all the
sounds of French, whereas during the last step, L3, they will be confronted with all the signs
(all the spellings possible for each sound).
All of this work is done by means of exercises whose aim is to lead to the awarenesses
necessary for this learning experience. The choice of exercises depends on what can be
tackled now, on the basis of what has already been mastered, the degree of autonomy and
responsibility the children have and the way they go about learning. It also depends on what
triggers an activity for one student or another, or what triggers what is necessary to bring to
mind situations which have already been explored in order to bring to the fore criteria of
certitude as well as the affective, or sometimes emotional charge that came out of particular
circumstances:
“It’s the sound that Julie found”; “It’s when we did such and such a thing that Nicolas said
“Ah!” and finally understood what it was all about and everybody laughed because the others
had already understood for quite a while.”

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I must close this talk now because I have come to the end of the time allowed me and not
because there is nothing more to say. I hope that, through this brief presentation of his vision
and his discoveries in the field of learning and teaching reading (of French for what we are
dealing with today), I have created in you a feeling for the richness and the importance of the
work done by C. Gattegno in the Science of Education. I remain at your disposal now and in
the future should you wish further information. In the workshop which follows we will look at
how it is possible to use this approach with auditive deficient children. I would ask you to
keep those questions you may have concerning those children for that time.
© Suzanne Lachaise Besançon, May 24, 1990
The Science of Education in Questions - N° 4 - December 1990
"Caleb Gattegno's Words in Colour" by Suzanne Lachaise is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.