Built by teachers, loved by learners.

English Language Training Solutions (ELTS) is a teacher-built educational training company dedicated to helping English teachers around the world address the challenges of teaching and learning English.

We proudly serve teachers, volunteers, schools, and organizations ranging from the U.S. Department of State’s Office of English Language Programs and U.S. Peace Corps to universities, non-profit organizations, and public schools.

ELTS publishes the Color Vowel® Chart and is the exclusive training provider of the Color Vowel® Approach. Our patented learning process is built into our innovative pronunciation/literacy game, COLOR it out!, and the award-winning mobile app, Blue Canoe.

Our Story

Karen Taylor created the Color Vowel® Chart at the Maryland English Institute in 1999. Karen’s international teaching assistants appreciated the way it helped them to pronounce academic and technical vocabulary while improving their prosody and overall fluency.

Right around that time, Karen met Shirley Thompson at a conference sponsored by the Washington Area Teachers of English for Speakers of Other Languages (WATESOL). From that moment, a friendship of life-long collaboration was born!

Shirley Thompson piloted the Chart with international students at George Washington University. Quickly recognizing their shared interest in pronunciation and brain-based learning, Karen and Shirley continued developing the Color Vowel® Chart together.

Dr. Robin Barr, Linguist In Residence at American University, soon joined the effort, testing the simplicity of the Chart against the complexities of phonology. Time and again, she has found that the Color Vowel® Chart delivers– providing linguists, teachers, and learners with a touchstone for describing the deep rules of spoken English.

Laura McIndoo, an ESL teacher at Central New Mexico Community College, encountered the Color Vowel® Chart at a conference in 2013 and instantly recognized its potential. With a talent for graphic design and a love of game-based learning, Laura created the spoken card game known today as Color it Out!

Color it Out! was an immediate hit with learners and teachers alike. Adult English learners celebrated it as a game they could play with their English-speaking children at home. Reading specialists took note of the game as a way to reach learners with dyslexia and other language-based learning difficulties. English learners immediately found the game fun and beneficial.

Color it Out! drew the attention of a friend in the tech industry, and a new company was born in 2016. The Blue Canoe mobile app combines the patented Color Vowel® method with speech recognition and machine learning to provide people around the world with access to a virtual English pronunciation coach, a perfect complement to Color Vowel classroom instruction.

All the while, we've developed Color Vowel into a robust brain-based approach to effective language teaching and learning. Today, ELTS offers over a dozen courses across three levels of training and certification. Teachers and schools all over the world invest in Color Vowel courses as their professional development 'go-to' for English language teaching.

Our world-wide community of passionate teachers and learners has made Color Vowel® what it is today: a powerful method that connects the spoken and written forms of English with unprecedented clarity, raising profound implications for language identity, reading readiness, vocabulary development, pronunciation, and so much more.

Karen Taylor

Co-Founder and Director

holds an MA in TESOL from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and a BA in English Literature from Georgetown University. She taught TESOL graduate courses for nine years as Practitioner in Residence at American University and served as Adult ESL Coordinator at Santa Fe Community College in New Mexico. Karen is co-author of the Color Vowel Chart.

Lynn Swanda

Teacher Trainer

has taught English to non-native speakers of all ages and levels for over 25 years. She has a Master of Education in ESL and has lived and worked overseas in Belgium, Germany, Thailand, and South Korea for the majority of her teaching career. Currently, she resides in Oklahoma City and teaches at Oklahoma City Community College.

Claire Lee

Course Manager & Communications

is a TESOL teacher trainer and instructor with over 12 years of experience. She has served as an English Language Specialist, English Language Fellow, and Fulbright ETA in the United States, South Africa, Vietnam, Japan, Russia, the Philippines, and China. She holds a M.Ed. from Harvard University and a B.A. from Wellesley College.

Shirley Thompson

Co-Founder and Advisor

holds an MA in Linguistics from the University of Michigan and a BA in History and African Studies from Kalamazoo College. Shirley served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Bénin and Togo, taught for 25 years at the George Washington University, and served as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer in Senegal. She later founded the ESL program at All Souls Church in Washington DC. Shirley is co-author of the Color Vowel Chart.

Robin Barr

Lead Phonologist

holds a PhD/ MA in Linguistics from Harvard and a BA in Linguistics from Yale. Dr. Barr served as Linguist in Residence at American University. In her work at the Washington Literacy Center, Robin developed a responsive curriculum that combines traditional phonics with the Color Vowel® Approach. At ELTS, Robin provides teachers with a practical understanding of phonology.

Built by teachers, loved by learners.

Our Story