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is a visual organizer for spoken English. Each color represents a vowel sound.
For example, GREEN is the high front vowel /iy/, as found in the words tree and teacher. Similarly, BLUE represents the high back vowel /uw/, as found in the words true and student. In this way, each phrase serves both as a key word and a visual cue for a specific stressed vowel sound. Click on each color to hear the Color Vowel anchor phrase and its corresponding vowel sound.
The Color Vowel® Chart is used by English as a Second Language teachers, speech therapists, pronunciation trainers, reading specialists and educators across the US and around the world.
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Blue Canoe combines the Color Vowel® system with voice recognition and machine learning to provide learners with high-yield pronunciation practice.
With Blue Canoe, students can take their Color Vowel learning experience beyond the classroom. Blue Canoe is available for individual use or at the school level, providing teachers and administrators with a robust dashboard for monitoring student engagement. Visit Blue Canoe to learn more.
Color Vowel Basics© is an asynchronous, self-paced introduction to the Color Vowel® Approach. Complete four video-based modules and taking companion quizzes for each module at your own pace.
This live, interactive online course immerses you in the use the Color Vowel® Approach and our pronunciation app, Blue Canoe®. Expand your awareness as you master powerful, brain-based strategies for teaching learner pronunciation, vocabulary development, and oral fluency. Post technique practicum videos after each live session and receive personalized feedback from your Color Vowel® Coach.
Practice the rhythms and sounds of English and boost your speaking confidence with Pure English Practice, a brain-based pronunciation ‘workout’ for English learners. Teachers, invite your learners! Learners, invite your teachers! PEP happens on the first and third Thursday of each month.
To attend Pure English Practice, subscribe here. After subscribing, you will receive reminders and links for our next event.
Expert panelists share insights, perspectives and tips for teaching pronunciation to Arabic-speaking learners of English.
Topics will include:
Join Karen Taylor, co-author of the Color Vowel Approach, for an overview of this innovative, brain-based method for teaching spoken English, pronunciation, vocabulary, and reading to English learners.
English Learners struggle with traditional phonics programs. Learn how to use Color Vowel tools and strategies to help learners succeed.
This workshop is appropriate for ESL/EFL teachers, tutors, and reading specialists. No prior training in the Color Vowel® Approach is necessary.
Unable to attend live? This workshop will be recorded and and shared privately with all registrants. We have structured the workshop for live participation in a way that supports an enriching asynchronous experience!
Workshop Description
Whether you are a teacher, a literacy volunteer, a learning coach, or a teacher educator, this workshop will provide you with new insights and effective strategies that you can use right away.
In this one-day workshop with Dr. Robin Barr and special guests, participants will gain insight into what a good phonics program can achieve, where all phonics programs fall short, and how Color Vowels bridge the gap.
Workshop activities will include:
Gain pronunciation coaching experience and insight throughout this 8-week experience.
During the first two weeks, you will be trained to listen, identify, prioritize, and address learner pronunciation challenges by utilizing Color Vowel® strategies taught in the Level 2 Core workshops.
During the next five weeks, you will participate as a Coach in Speak Confidently!, our learner pronunciation course taught by Jennifer Campion and Karen Taylor. Working closely with your practicum mentor and coaching cohort, you will lead select class activities and provide weekly feedback to between 1-3 students enrolled in the course.
A final meeting on the eighth week provides us with an opportunities to reflect on lessons taught and lessons learned.
Prerequisites: All level 2 Core courses: Color Vowel Yoga, Spelling Exploration, Rhythm & Chants, and Sound Awareness.
Level 1 trained teachers may audit this course.
This course is for non-native English-speaking teachers and advanced English learners who wish to increase their comprehensibility and confidence in spoken English.
In this 5-session practice-based course taught by Jennifer Campion, Karen Taylor and their team of Color Vowel pronunciation coaches, participants will engage in a series of brain-based English pronunciation lessons and activities that build awareness of the sounds and rhythms of English for the purpose of being more confident in their spoken English.
Learn how to preview, lead, and close chants with learners using existing chants and modified chants. Course participants will:
Readers Theater (RT) is a group read-aloud in which individuals perform level-appropriate scripts to tell a story cooperatively. Participants will learn how RT supports development of the learner’s external reading voice (rate, vocabulary, and pronunciation/ comprehensibility) as well as their “internal” reading voice (the voice they “hear” when reading silently), thereby strengthening both oral fluency and reading fluency.
Participants will learn how to guide students through a Readers Theater project from preparation to presentation. They will explore ways that maximize the repetition and noticing necessary to improve fluency in both reading and speaking. Participants will also review the suprasegmental skills of speaking: thought groups, focus words, linking, reduction, and intonation.
Phonological awareness is a person’s awareness of the sounds, rhythms, and intonations they use when speaking and when listening to the speech of others.
In this practice-based workshop, Dr. Robin Barr will lead participants through a series of discovery activities and mini-lectures aimed at increasing teachers’ sound awareness for the purpose of English language teaching.
This course is for teachers with Color Vowel® Level 1 certification.
Color Vowel® Yoga is a collection of simple movements that parallel the movement of the jaw, lips, and tongue when producing the vowel sounds of English. These movements serve as physical anchors for producing sounds that the learner may not yet be able to perceive. In this practice-based workshop, participants increase their own phonological awareness as they gain confidence in leading Vowel Yoga and learn when to use Vowel Yoga as an instructional intervention.
This Level 2 workshop is open to Level 1 certified teachers or teachers currently enrolled in a Level 1 Color Vowel® Certification course.
Do you dread having to teach vocabulary? Do your students seem to forget vocabulary as soon as you move on to the next unit? In this 4-session workshop, we will approach vocabulary from a sound perspective to appreciate how word learning intersects with pronunciation, collocation, and the aural context. Participants will gain practical strategies to boost learner retention through both incidental and deliberate teaching.
Learn how taking a sound-based approach to spelling empowers learners to notice patterns and engage in life-long language discovery.
In this 4-week online workshop, participants will:
Gain pronunciation coaching experience and insight throughout this 8-week experience.
During the first two weeks, you will be trained to listen, identify, prioritize, and address learner pronunciation challenges by utilizing Color Vowel® strategies taught in the Level 2 Core workshops.
During the next five weeks, you will participate as a Coach in Speak Confidently!, our learner pronunciation course taught by Jennifer Campion and Karen Taylor. Working closely with your practicum mentor and coaching cohort, you will lead select class activities and provide weekly feedback to between 1-3 students enrolled in the course.
A final meeting on the eighth week provides us with an opportunities to reflect on lessons taught and lessons learned.
Prerequisites: All level 2 Core courses: Color Vowel Yoga, Spelling Exploration, Rhythm & Chants, and Sound Awareness.
Level 1 trained teachers may audit this course.
THE PROBLEM: English Learners struggle with phonics.
In a phonics framework, letters are treated as the primary or basic units for learning to read. However, because English does not have a one-to-one correspondence of sound to symbol, phonics instruction in English requires the learner to ‘sound out’ all the possible pronunciations of a spelling until they happen to hear a word they recognize. This process crucially depends on the learner already possessing a well-developed oral vocabulary to which they can connect the words they are trying to decode.
English learners, with their limited English vocabularies, need intervention that boosts their oral/aural word recognition as they learn to make use of the English spelling patterns presented in a high-quality phonics program.
THE SOLUTION: Complement phonics with Color Vowel Approach (CVA) strategies.
The Color Vowel Approach starts with oral words and phonemes as primary. The spellings of those sounds are treated as inherently secondary, mirroring natural language development in which the alphabet, reading, and writing, stem from spoken language.
Guided by Dr. Robin Barr, lead instructor at the Washington Literacy Center, participants will explore practical ways to enhance phonics programs with Color Vowel strategies.
This course is for non-native English-speaking teachers and advanced English learners who wish to increase their comprehensibility and confidence in spoken English.
In this 5-session practice-based course taught by Jennifer Campion, Karen Taylor and their team of Color Vowel pronunciation coaches, participants will engage in a series of brain-based English pronunciation lessons and activities that build awareness of the sounds and rhythms of English for the purpose of being more confident in their spoken English.
Course Dates
This is a five-week course that meets on Wednesdays from 1-2:30 pm ET.
Due to the U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, there will be no class on Wednesday, November 23rd. Our live session dates are therefore November 2, 9, 16, 30, and December 7.
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