Shape Coding
What is Shape Coding?
Shape Coding is a system designed by Speech and Language Therapist Dr Susan Ebbels, and
it was used to help teach spoken and written grammar to children with Developmental
Language Disorder (DLD). It has since been developed and progressed to help children and
young people with language disorders, children with hearing impairment, children with
Down syndrome and adults with language difficulties after a stroke.
The Shape Coding system uses a visual coding system to show a child the rules for how
words are put together in sentences, to develop the child’s understanding of spoken and
written grammar, and to develop their ability to use grammar successfully to express
themselves.
How does it work?
The system uses colours, arrows and shapes to give visual representations for sentence
structure. Colours are used to represent parts of speech, arrows to represent tense and
aspect, and shapes to represent syntactic and argument structure.
Parts of speech and their colours:
Colour Name Example
Red Nouns/pronouns Boy, table, I, you
Pink Determiners/possessive pronouns The, a, my
Blue Verbs Push, melt, kick, jump
Green Adjectives Hard, sad
Yellow Prepositions In, on, under, through
Brown Adverbs Quickly, carefully, slowly
Purple Coordinating conjunction And, but, or
Orange Subordinating conjunction Because, if
These are the shapes used for the different grammatical parts of the sentence:
Noun Phrase: Subject Noun Phrase: Object
The item/person performs the action The item/person that receives the action
Who What? Who What?
Auxiliary or Modal Verb Verb Phrase
Be, do, can,
may, shall, is, What doing?
are, would
Adjective Phrase Prepositional Phrase
What Like? How Feel? Who What?
Why?
How?
When?
As children became more able to use this system other elements can be added to make these
sentences more grammatically complex…
Arrows are used beneath verbs to show the tense e.g.
Present Tense Past Tense
Pink lines are placed below determiners (e.g. ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘one’, ‘first’, ‘most’, all’)
Double lines are also used to indicate plurals e.g. cat vs cats
Shape Coding can help children learn the basic grammatical structure of sentences to use in
structured settings, such as in lessons, as well as spontaneously. Children will often only start
out with simple sentences, such as:
Ben eats crisps
And allows them to develop their skills with visual representation to form more complex
sentences, such as:
The happy boy is putting his chocolate cake on her plate
This sentence includes the use of arrows to show tense, as well as showing the phrase
structure of a sentence. The above sentence includes a noun phrase embedded within a
prepositional phrase, and another noun phrase within a verb phrase, as well as the zig-zag
arrow showing the present participle in ‘putting’.
This shows how Shape Coding can give visual representations to very complex language.