Designing Colours and Materials in Tangible Reading Products for Foreign Language Learners of English

One design challenge of tangible reading systems is how to leverage the design of physical properties to best support the learning process. In this paper, we present an exploratory study which investigated how 18 young adults who learn English as a foreign language associated colours and materials to English letter-sound pairs. The preliminary results indicate that the letter-sound-colour mappings are influenced mainly by the literacy meaning of the letters while the letter-sound-material mappings are strongly affected by the characteristics of letter sounds. We discuss the design implications and future work for designing tangible reading systems for foreign language learners.