Using Colors in Your TEFL Classes

Feel like your lessons are a little monochrome? Here are five ideas from Kenneth Beare (editor of esl.about.com) to inject some color into your classes with pens, chalk, and crayons. It won't just make your lessons livelier, it'll also help the teaching process, as many students find visual aids help them better understand tricky concepts:

Using Color to Teach Tenses

One of the most common instructional topics you'll face in the classroom is the use of tenses to express past, present and future. Using colored pens to help students learn or review tense related structures can help them visually hone in on the language used. Here are some of the ways you can employ colored pens or highlighters:

- Ask students to select a short reading passage (or provide one). Have students highlight sentences in different tenses (e.g. past, present, future) in the text.
- Use colored blocks to assist with telling stories. Introduce the story saying that a certain color represents a certain tense and hold the colored wood blocks up as you tell the story.
- Have students write a short composition and ask them to switch colors depending on the tense used in a given sentence. Alternately, for lower level classes, have students write a story in pencil and use a specific color for a specific tense. Start with only one tense, then build up more as students become more confident.

Using Color for Correction

An effective technique for correction is to use standard proofreading symbols and ask students to correct their homework based on the symbols. A variation on this theme is to associate these symbols with different colors. The colors will literally pop off the page giving students key information on specific areas that need improvement.

Associating Color with Mood and Language

Why do people sing the blues? Because they feel sad. You know that, I know that. There are quite a few idioms associated with color in English. Write these idioms on the board, and ask if the same colors are used for this type of idiom in students' own native language. This can lead to a discussion of how color reflects the way we feel. Top this off with an exercise assigning colors to adjectives, and you've built in some excellent hooks for students to learn new vocabulary.

Maybe don't go too crazy with the chalk... (picture: LesterSpence)

Colored Chalk / Markers

If you have a chalkboard or a white board in class, use colored chalk or markers for competitions or group exercises. Here are some ideas on how you can use these colored markers:

- Create a vocabulary tree as a class. Pass out cards describing objects in the supermarket, in a restaurant etc. Have students take these objects and create a vocabulary tree on the board assigning each object to the correct category associated with a specific color.
- In small groups, assign one color to each student. Tell a short story or work on new vocabulary. Students should then use their colored chalk or markers to reproduce the group activity on the board by assigning either a tense or vocabulary type to each color.

How do you use colour in your classroom?

• TEFL
• TEFL tips
• TEFL activities
• TEFL games