Worksheets: colour or no colour?

 

If you are familiar with my work and/or this blog, you will know that I am a prolific creator of worksheets and other classroom resources for the teaching of languages.  If you use the resources that I make available free on Light Bulb Languages, you'll know that the vast majority of the student worksheets are black and white. 

Why do I make them in black and white?  Mainly because black and white printing and photocopying is a lot cheaper than colour.  I have to limit my colour printing at school because of the cost - it's no secret that schools are struggling financially in England at the moment.  I break up text with carefully chosen images, but very rarely is their colour important.

Because I am a prolific creator of worksheets, I often take a professionally curious look at what other providers are offering, to see how it compares to my output.  I often see worksheets that are in colour.  So whereas, for example, I create a black and white sentence builder that looks like this:

I often see examples like this:

or this:

or perhaps a combination of the two!

Cost aside, what does the addition of colour lend to the student learning experience?  Does it make for better learning and better production of language?  If the colourful worksheets have to be printed in black and white, will their effect be the same?  Will they be as clear?

In the primary classroom there has recently been a move away from too much colour.  Brightly coloured displays have been replaced with quieter affairs on hessian-backed boards.  This is in a bid to prevent a sensory overload for children.  Should resources also be "quieter"?

Some children also use coloured overlays on their worksheets or view them through glasses with coloured lenses in order to make them easier to read.  Others have their worksheets copied on paper that is not white.  Will the colours on the worksheet look the same to these children and have the intended impact?

An internet search on the benefit of using colour on worksheets reveals quite a few webpages by print companies, who have a vested interest and perhaps not quite so much educational experience. I found this article, which mentions colour being beneficial for colour coding activities, such as using colours to group certain items.  But surely children can add their own colour coding to a black and white worksheet?  Using the sentence builder examples above, what would be the benefits of the students adding the colours themselves?  In the primary classroom, Colourful Semantics is becoming more popular, and colour coding words by class is certainly not an alien concept in the language classroom.

What do you think?  Do you favour black and white or colour for your worksheets?