About LangKeyB

LangKeyB automatically colours each word by its grammatical role as the teacher types, live, on the board at the front of the class.

Teaching that uses colour to show the shape of a sentence has been in primary and SEN classrooms for years, but almost always on printed cards and laminated strips prepared in advance. LangKeyB does it live. A teacher types a sentence the class has just made up, and it colours itself as the words appear.

Where it came from

Out of more than fifteen years of work alongside mainstream primary-school children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN). The colour-coded frameworks were already there, used every day on cards and strips; the question that started this was why the board at the front of the room could not do the same thing by itself, with whatever sentence a class had just invented, at the speed the lesson was moving.

What it is, in the end, is a colour-coded keyboard: a way for early writers to see the shape of their own ideas as they write them down.

Who uses this approach

Colourful Semantics and Language Through Colour are in everyday use in primary schools and in speech and language therapy - by teachers and teaching assistants with whole classes and small groups, by speech and language therapists in targeted work, and by parents and carers supporting writing at home.

Both were developed originally as therapeutic frameworks, and are commonly used with children who have developmental language disorder or a language delay, autistic children who find a visual and predictable structure easier to work with, children learning English as an additional language who are getting to grips with English word order, and children for whom holding a whole sentence in mind while writing it is hard work.

That describes where the approach is used. It is not a claim about what this website achieves - see What LangKeyB does not claim below.

The three boards

Language Through Colour colours word by word: nouns orange, verbs yellow, adjectives green, and so on.

SEN Language Through Colour uses the sentence-part structure with the word-type colours, so a child can see that the Who? chunk is built out of a noun. It sits with Language Through Colour and uses the same colours.

Colourful Semantics colours whole parts of a sentence by the question they answer: Who? What doing? What? Where?

Spelling is marked against Oxford British English. Over two hundred American spellings are marked as wrong and offered the British word instead - colour for color, centre for center, realise for realize, pavement for sidewalk - except where both are correct British English in different senses, such as practice and practise, licence and license, meter and metre, or story and storey.

What else is here

Up-levelling, a thesaurus for the words a class reaches for first - said, went, big, nice - which offers stronger ones in the same form, ready to drop straight into the sentence. A word that is already strong is offered other words at the same level instead, and a word like the, whose job is the same in every sentence, is told why there is nothing to swap. Over twelve hundred headwords and five thousand alternatives, all held in the page. An on-screen keyboard low enough on the board for a child to reach. A word bank that sorts words into their types as a class calls them out, and prints. A language features checklist that ticks itself when the board holds a simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, idiom or onomatopoeia, an expanded noun phrase, or a co-ordinating or subordinating conjunction joining two clauses. Four class games for the whole room and three for a child practising alone. And a Save panel that writes the lesson, the word banks and any corrections to a file on your own computer, or hands it out as a Word document or a PDF.

How the colouring is worked out

By a dictionary of about 4,000 words and a set of grammar rules, both built into the page and both running on your own device. English is ambiguous and the same word changes its class with its context, so it will sometimes be wrong. Right-click or tap a word to change it.

Attribution

LangKeyB supports the Colourful Semantics approach, developed by Alison Bryan.

LangKeyB is an independent tool. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Alison Bryan, any local authority, any school, any publisher, or any organisation associated with the Language Through Colour or Colourful Semantics approaches. Those names are used here only to describe which established approach each board follows, so that teachers can find the one they already use. All rights in those approaches remain with their originators.

LangKeyB is not an NHS initiative and has no connection to any NHS body.

What LangKeyB does not claim

No claim is made that using LangKeyB improves attainment, language development, or any other outcome. The published evidence for colour-coded approaches to grammar is limited. LangKeyB is a presentation tool: it shows the colour coding a teacher has chosen to use, quickly and on a big screen. The teaching is the teacher's.

Credits

The board uses the fonts already installed on your computer and asks no other server for anything. Andika, by SIL International, is named first in the reading font list because it is drawn for early readers; if a school installs it, the board will use it, and if not the next font in the list is used instead. The word-class colouring is done on the device by a built-in dictionary and a set of grammar rules. No font service, no language service, and no outside service of any kind is used.

Who makes it

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Mrs Shelley Kerr - Speech and Language Higher Level Teaching Assistant (HLTA), with over fifteen years of experience working in a mainstream primary school, alongside children with speech, language and communication needs.

Dr Jack Thomson - a doctor with an interest in education and medical education, who spent four years volunteering in a primary school while at medical school.

It is free, it is not funded by anyone, and nothing on it is sponsored or advertised.

Contact

Questions, corrections and feedback from teachers are genuinely welcome, and are how most of this got built: , or the Send feedback button at the bottom of the page.

Terms of use

Last updated

LangKeyB is provided free, as it is, for use in teaching. By using it you accept these terms.

1. Who provides this

This site is provided by LangKeyB, a trading name used by , of . LangKeyB is not a limited company, and it is not part of, funded by or endorsed by any school, health body or other organisation. Where these pages say “the operator”, they mean the two of them trading as LangKeyB.

Email is how to reach us about anything - a fault, a wrong colour, a question from your school's data lead, or any further detail a procurement or finance team needs from us: . There is also a Send feedback button at the bottom of every page. A full postal address for service of documents is available on request by email, and we answer requests for information from schools.

2. Free to use

Teachers, schools, parents and children may use LangKeyB for teaching and learning at no charge. You may display it on a whiteboard or projector, use it with a class, show it to colleagues, and link to it. No licence fee is payable and no account is needed.

This permission is for teaching and learning. It does not extend to selling access, bundling LangKeyB into a paid product or service, or running it as part of a commercial training offer, without written permission.

3. What you type stays yours

Sentences, word banks and corrections you type are yours. Nothing you type is transmitted to the operator, so no claim is made over any of it. Files you save, print or export - the lesson file, the Word document, the PDF - are yours to use as you wish, including with pupils and colleagues.

4. The colouring is automatic, and it will sometimes be wrong

Words are classified by a built-in dictionary and a set of grammar rules. English is ambiguous, and the same word changes its class with its context. LangKeyB will sometimes colour a word incorrectly, mark a correctly spelt word as a mistake, or miss one. The spelling suggestions and the language features checklist read patterns, not meaning, and will make mistakes of the same kind. It is a teaching aid, not an authority on grammar. Check what appears on the screen before teaching from it, and use the right-click correction where you disagree. Nothing in LangKeyB is a substitute for a teacher's professional judgement.

5. No outcome is promised

LangKeyB makes no representation that its use will improve attainment, language development, test results, or any other outcome for any child.

6. Use with children

LangKeyB is intended to be used by a teacher, or by a child with a teacher's or parent's knowledge. It has no account, collects nothing, and shows nothing but what is typed into it. It is not a substitute for supervision, and the adult using it remains responsible for what is put on the screen in front of a class.

7. Do not type personal information into it

LangKeyB is designed so that nothing you type leaves the device. Even so, please do not enter pupils' full names, dates of birth, addresses, or any other personal or confidential information into the text box or the word bank. First names used as examples in a sentence are, of course, expected and fine.

8. Intellectual property

The LangKeyB name, logo, page design, written content, software, word lists and the arrangement of its features are the property of the operator and are protected by copyright. You may use LangKeyB as described in section 2. You may not copy, adapt, republish, resell, sublicense or redistribute it, remove or obscure any notice in it, present it as your own work, or incorporate it into another product or service, without written permission.

Printouts, screenshots and exported files made in the ordinary course of teaching a class may be used freely.

The teaching approaches LangKeyB supports were developed by others and are described in the About page. Nothing here claims ownership of them.

9. Availability

LangKeyB may be changed, interrupted or withdrawn at any time, without notice. It is provided without any guarantee of availability. Do not rely on it being there for a particular lesson without a fallback.

10. No warranty

LangKeyB is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent permitted by law, all warranties, conditions and terms implied by statute or common law are excluded, including any implied warranty of satisfactory quality, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement.

11. Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the operator is not liable for any loss or damage arising from the use of, or inability to use, LangKeyB, including lost teaching time, lost or corrupted saved settings, word banks or lesson files, or any indirect or consequential loss.

Nothing in these terms limits or excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded. Nothing in these terms affects the statutory rights of a consumer.

12. Changes to these terms

These terms may be updated. The date at the top shows when they last changed. Continuing to use LangKeyB after a change means accepting the revised terms.

13. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.

Privacy notice

Last updated

LangKeyB has no accounts, no sign-up, no analytics and no cookies. Nothing you type is sent anywhere. There is no server to send it to.

Who is responsible for this notice

LangKeyB - a trading name used by , of , and not a limited company. Because nothing is collected there is no data controller relationship to register, but questions from a school's data protection lead are welcome at and we will supply any further information a school needs, including a postal address.

What is collected

Nothing. LangKeyB does not collect, receive, transmit or store any information about you, your pupils, or what you type. There is no login, no registration, no tracking, no advertising and no third-party analytics. In data protection terms, the operator is not a processor of anything you put into it, because none of it is ever received.

What leaves the device

Nothing at all. Once the page has loaded it makes no request to any other server, ever, and there is no setting that would make it do so. Every style, script, word list, icon and image is inside the page itself, and the fonts are the ones already on your computer.

This is not only a promise. The page is served with a Content Security Policy of default-src 'none' and connect-src 'none', which means the browser itself refuses any outbound connection the page might attempt. An IT team can confirm it in the network tab of any browser: after the page loads, the list is empty.

The page itself is served by whoever hosts it, who will keep ordinary server logs of requests for the page, as any web server does.

What is kept on the device, and only on the device

So that the tool remembers how you like it set up, a few things are saved in the browser's own storage on the computer or tablet you are using:

• display settings - font, text size, which colours are switched on, the year group chosen
• the sentence currently on the board
• word banks you have built, and which columns you have switched on
• corrections you have made to how a word is coloured or spelt
• in Training Ground, a child's own scores, level and daily streak

This stays in that browser on that device. It is never transmitted, never seen by the operator, and not shared between devices or between users of the same device's other browsers. Clearing the browser's site data removes it, as does the "Reset all settings" button in Settings. Nobody needs to ask us to delete it, because we never have it.

Cookies

LangKeyB sets no cookies at all. The browser storage described above is used only to remember your own settings and work, and is not used to identify or track anyone, which is why no cookie banner is shown.

Children

LangKeyB is intended for use by teachers with a class, and by children practising with a parent or teacher's knowledge. No information is collected from children, and no child is asked for a name, an age, an email address or anything else. Training Ground scores are stored on that one device and are not linked to any person. Because nothing is collected, no age verification and no parental consent mechanism is required.

Your rights

Data protection rights - access, correction, erasure and the rest - apply to personal data held about a person. As LangKeyB holds none, there is nothing to release, correct or erase. If you believe otherwise, or have any question at all about this notice, please get in touch at .

Anyone with a concern about how personal data is handled in the UK may complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

A request to teachers

Because everything stays on the device, the safest thing you can do is keep it that way: please do not type pupils' personal details into the board or the word bank.

Accessibility statement

Prepared . LangKeyB has not yet been formally audited.

This statement explains how accessible LangKeyB is, what is known to fall short, and how to tell us about a problem.

What has been done

• Text can be set from 24px up to very large sizes for the back of a classroom.
• The reading font can be changed, including to sans-serif faces commonly preferred by dyslexic readers, and letter spacing and line spacing can be widened.
• Accessible mode adds a distinct pattern and the word type's initial to every coloured word, so the coding does not depend on colour alone.
• Word-type labels can be turned on so the name of the class appears above each word.
• Any individual word type can be switched off, and colour can be switched off entirely.
• Text and background colours are checked at runtime so that the letters stay legible against whichever colour a word is given, on light and dark backgrounds and on all six paper colours.
• Words shrink to fit their tile rather than running off the screen.
• A reduced-motion setting is respected: the animations in the games and the language feature cards are suppressed for anyone whose device asks for that, and a Calm background switch turns off the moving background for everyone.
• A dark room theme is available for a darkened classroom.
• The board itself is a plain text box, so it works with the keyboard, with dictation and with the browser's own zoom.

Known limitations

• Colour still carries meaning. The colour coding is the point of the tool, and the agreed palette contains pairs that are hard to distinguish for someone with red-green colour blindness. Accessible mode and the labels are the answer to that, but they are a choice a teacher has to make rather than the default.
• Keyboard access is partial. The board, the settings and the menus work from the keyboard. In the games, Word Race answers can be given with the number keys, but not every control in every game is reachable by keyboard alone.
• Screen reader support has not been tested with any assistive technology, and the colour of a word is not announced.
• JavaScript is required. The colouring happens on the device, so the page cannot work without it.
• No formal WCAG audit has been carried out. The intention is to meet WCAG 2.2 level AA; that has not been verified by testing.

Telling us about a problem

If something here stops you or a child using LangKeyB, please say so - it is the fastest way for it to get fixed:

Enforcement

LangKeyB is provided by a private individual and is not itself a public sector body, so the public sector accessibility regulations do not apply to it directly. It is used in schools, which are, and this statement is published so that a school can see where it stands.