Colourful semantics

Also called Colourful Semantics, Colour-coded sentences, Colourful sentences

Who is orange, what doing is yellow, what is green, where is blue. Colour-coding the parts of a sentence so a child can build one they can see.

What it is

Colourful semantics is a way of teaching sentence structure by giving each part of a sentence a colour. WHO (the person or thing doing it) is orange. WHAT DOING (the verb) is yellow. WHAT (the object) is green. WHERE is blue. Later, WHEN is purple, and describing words, and so on. A picture is described by laying coloured cards in order: orange "the girl", yellow "is eating", green "an apple", blue "in the garden".

Alison Bryan, a speech and language therapist, developed it in the 1990s. It has spread through UK primary and special schools because it works and because a teaching assistant can run it with a set of cards.

Who it can help

Children with developmental language disorder, children with a learning disability, autistic children who use single words, children learning English as an additional language, and AAC users learning to move beyond single symbols. It's used from about four upwards, in class and at home.

It's a teaching tool for sentence structure, not a communication system. A child needs some words to start with; a child with none needs modelling and core vocabulary first. And it's less useful for adults, though some aphasia therapists borrow the colours.

How it works

The levels build up one colour at a time. Level one: WHO alone, naming the person or animal in a picture. Level two: WHO plus WHAT DOING, which is the first real sentence, "the boy is running". Level three adds WHAT: "the boy is kicking the ball". Level four adds WHERE: "the boy is kicking the ball in the park". Beyond that come WHEN, HOW, describing words and joining words, in the same colour scheme.

The child answers a coloured question. Point to the orange card and ask "Who?"; to the yellow and ask "What doing?". The colours cue which slot is missing, so a child who left out the verb can see that the yellow space is empty. Over time the cards are faded and the colours live in the child's head.

The same colours carry over into writing, where an orange, yellow, green, blue underline shows a child what's in their sentence, and into some AAC page sets, which colour-code their vocabulary the same way (semantic-syntactic grids often do).

Getting started

Ask the school whether they use it; many do and will send home a set of cards. If not, make one: coloured card in orange, yellow, green and blue, and a pile of pictures from magazines or your phone.

Start at level two. Show a picture of someone doing something. "Who?" Orange card, name them. "What doing?" Yellow card, say the verb. Put the two cards in a row and read them together. Five pictures a day.

If the child uses a device, check whether its vocabulary is colour-coded, and if it is, whether the colours match. A mismatch confuses more than it helps.

Where to get help

Your NHS speech and language therapist can assess which level the child is at and lend a set. Speech and Language UK and Afasic explain sentence-building support for families. NAPLIC is the association for professionals working with language impairment in schools. RADLD links to developmental language disorder resources.