Colour Your English!
An innovative book developed by Stephanie Hirschman, an ESL educator in Lewes, England, and Saint Louis University Studio Art faculty, Amy Alton Bautz, to activate learning through haptic and meditative coloring exercises.
It is a remarkable and unique use of art to support language acquisition.
The ESL book, which has twelve lessons and twelve coloring pages, instructs ESL learners to use vocabulary and grammar lessons to color images according to a color key. This gives the students opportunity to relax as they review ESL learning content by coloring an image in a method similar to paint-by-numbers.
While coloring is widely accepted as a meditative activity, the authors of this book sought to adapt and refine the activity to take advantage of the calming effect while reinforcing student learning outcomes. Through ten years of research and development, Hirschman and Bautz have integrated vocabulary and grammar instruction into content-specific coloring pages. Tested in ESL classrooms throughout England, the coloring pages have been found by students and instructors alike to provide a pleasurable and augmented learning experience using multiple sensory input.
Colour Your English! provides tactile and visual feedback while learners sort English words idiomatically in order to color areas correctly. In adaption to learner response and classroom implementation, the coloring images are intended to be removed from the book and displayed in classrooms or homes, providing ESL students with content review.
Published in fall of 2023 by the Japanese/British publisher, Perceptia Press, Colour Your English! is geared towards the Japanese ESL learning community.
About the Authors
Stephanie Hirschman is an English language teacher and materials writer now living in the UK, and Amy Alton Bautz is an artist and art educator living in the USA. Working together on this book has been a continuation of a life-long conversation about playfulness, creativity, and learning. From painting together while learning French in nursery school, to making their own Latin comic book in high school, to the innovative pedagogy of Colour Your English!, Stephanie and Amy share a love of language and art.