Who We Are

Color Vowel®: For Teachers, By Teachers

English Language Training Solutions (ELTS) is a teacher-built educational training company that has helped over 10,000 teachers worldwide to address the challenges of teaching and learning English. ELTS is the exclusive training provider of the Color Vowel® Approach and publisher of the Color Vowel® Chart.

Our Journey So Far

Karen Taylor created the Color Vowel® Chart while working with international teaching assistants at the University of Maryland in 1999. She soon discovered that the course, the text, and her students were over-reliant on IPA transcription. They were learning about pronunciation, but not practicing it.

One weekend, Karen created the Chart as a bold -- and as it turned out, hugely successful -- effort to get them to look up and actually speak. 

Soon afterwards, Karen was introduced to Shirley Thompson who was teaching  at George Washington University. Shirley was instantly intrigued and piloted the Chart with her international students.

Quickly recognizing their shared interest in pronunciation and brain-based learning, Karen and Shirley continued developing the Color Vowel® Chart together and started spreading the word about this unique tool at workshops and conferences.

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!®.

All the while, our passionate community of inquisitive teachers and learners has made Color Vowel® what it is today: a wonderfully multi-modal, brain-based way of teaching that connects the spoken and written forms of English with unprecedented clarity, raising profound implications for language identity, pronunciation, vocabulary development, reading readiness, and so much more.

Another ESL teacher, Jennifer Campion, joined our team in 2019 to provide administrative and curriculum development support to our fast-growing business. 

We now offer a wide range of classroom materials that allow a brain-based approach to language learning that is accessible and engaging for learners of all ages and levels. 

We also provide training and certification in our methodology to individual teachers and to universities, colleges, non-profit organizations, and public schools.

How Can We Help You?

Thank you for your interest in Color Vowel®. We are so pleased to welcome you to our community of dedicated English language instructors, speech therapists, literacy teachers, and community volunteers. Don't hesitate to contact us at customersupport@colorvowel.com if you have any questions or need more information.