The Colour-coded orthography revolves around language, literacy, linguistics, phonetics, and the International Phonetic Alphabet. The development has been influenced by a combination of my own cultural and linguistic experiences. I was born and raised in an English-speaking society, Australia. My language at birth is Chinese. I also learned to speak Spanish, Japanese and some French, but my dominant language is English. The Roman alphabet is the written script for English and much of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family, which includes English, German, Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian, the Scandinavian languages, and Gothic. (Google Search: Germanic language Definition)

To read and write English well, language learners need to understand and apply the alphabetic principle. The alphabetic principle refers to the sounding out of words and naming the letters as they are written on the printed page and writing down the correct spelling of words as they are heard, either spoken or read. This is the understanding of the alphabetic principle.

To learn the alphabetic principal of the English reading and writing system is highly complex and a lengthy process because a large percentage of words follow many different rules and the spelling patterns in words do not always follow their rhyming sounds as do the words in Spanish or the Finish languages. The reading and writing script for these languages are categorized as shallow orthographies, whereas English is categorized a deep orthography.

My passion and purpose have been focused on fixing this problem and, now, I’ve have solved the problem after some 30 years of research and development. The complexity of the sound and spelling system is what I have identified as the fundamental core issue and, in fact, the major cause of my own reading failure during my early years of learning to read. Many children face the same challenges today. A lot of children will be spared the struggles in learning to read and the painful consequences of becoming illiterate, especially, those learning English from multicultural backgrounds. I’ve cracked the code on the alphabetic principle with Reading in Colour.

With both RiC educational resources and the cognitively based teaching methodology, the average child from grade 1 to grade 3 gains the necessary reading and writing skills within one year to, at most, 2 years depending on the age, cognitive development and their conceptual maturity. For mature learners depending on their motivation, cognitive development and conceptual maturity, literacy acquisition is very fast.

The Colour-coded system of Reading in Colour applied to the English language is the pillar and foundation to literacy acquisition and applicable to all languages.