The British Council recently formed a partnership with the ARDAA research network in English didactics to share the voices and work of different researchers in France in an accessible and engaging way. Our goal is that English teachers have the opportunity to hear from a wide range of academics working in the field and to experiment with their insights in their classrooms. These blogs do not represent official British Council recommendations but help feed lively debates and discussions around English teaching and learning.
In this blog article, Evgueniya Lyu from the Université Grenoble Alpes shares her research into the effect of ink colour on the way learners perceive the feedback we provide on their written work.
We often hear that colour is powerful. In marketing, black suggests luxury, green safety, red danger, blue calm, and so on. Teachers may not be selling a product, but we are communicating something every time we mark any student work. And many of us remember the classic moment: a page covered in red ink, rushed handwriting, abrupt comments – feedback that feels heavy before you even start reading it.
So, here is the question that started our project: what if the colour we use to mark student work shapes not only how students feel about their grade, but also how they engage with the feedback?
I almost never use red. I tend to pick pink, orange, brown, or green because I, personally, find red too close to a silent telling-off. But is that just my impression, or does colour really matter to students?
Because research on ink colour and students’ perceptions of corrective feedback is still limited, we ran a small pilot study to explore what might be going on.
We focused on four questions:
- Emotions: does pen colour affect what students feel when they see their mark?
- Attention: does pen colour affect how carefully students read corrections?
- Teacher severity: does pen colour affect whether the teacher seems “too severe”?
- Error severity: does pen colour affect how serious students think their errors are?
Seventy-three second-year university students completed an anonymous questionnaire after receiving a marked copy. They were split into three conditions:
- blue ink: 25 students;
- red ink: 20 students;
- green ink: 28 students.
Colour and Emotions
To explore emotions, we used the eight categories from Plutchik’s (1980) wheel of emotions (anticipation, joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger). Students chose the single emotion that best matched how they felt when they saw their mark.
Each colour seemed to come with its own emotional pattern. Green was never linked to fear, and only rarely to sadness. It was also strongly linked to joy. At the same time, green scored higher in terms of anger than the other colours in our sample, which came as a surprise. Red triggered surprise the least and was never associated with disgust. However, it appeared more often in terms of sadness and anticipation. Blue was most often linked with surprise and disgust, and it was never associated with anticipation in our data.
Ink colour seems to carry emotional meaning, but not always in predictable ways. Green may feel supportive (less fear and sadness) yet still provoke irritation (anger). Red may feel conventional (less surprise) while also encouraging an anticipatory mindset. Blue may stand out as unusual (surprise) and, in some cases, be experienced as more off-putting (disgust).
Colour and Attention
Red is often assumed to catch the eye and, therefore, to encourage students to engage more closely with feedback. In our pilot, however, this expectation was not clearly supported. Students whose copies were marked in blue and green tended to report that they read the corrections carefully. By contrast, those who received red feedback were slightly less likely to describe the same level of careful rereading. Overall, the pattern suggests that blue and green can be at least as effective as red in drawing students’ attention to their errors.
Colour and Teacher Severity
We also explored whether ink colour influenced how students perceived the teacher’s strictness. In our pilot, students whose copies were marked in blue were more likely to describe the teacher as too severe. By contrast, this perception was less common when feedback was provided in red or green. Although these findings are only indicative, they suggest that blue may sometimes convey a harsher tone than either red or green.
Colour and Error Severity
Next, we examined whether ink colour affected how serious students perceived their mistakes to be. Students whose copies were marked in red or green were more likely to describe their errors as serious and requiring immediate correction, whereas blue did not seem to convey the same sense of importance and urgency.
If you tend to mark in red because you assume it will help students pay attention, this pilot points to a practical alternative. Green appears to support careful engagement with corrections while being less associated with threat-related emotions, such as fear and sadness. Blue, by contrast, may not be as emotionally “neutral” as it is sometimes assumed to be: in our sample, it stood out (often linked to surprise), but was also associated with more negative reactions, and it more frequently coincided with perceptions of a harsher marker.
These findings remain preliminary, and a larger sample would be needed to confirm whether the results can be generalised. One important limitation is that we did not record the grades that students obtained, and we believe that grades could have an influence on emotions and judgements of severity.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Margot Griffith and Marc Chatterji, the two teachers who helped conduct this study by marking 76 copies and inviting their students to complete the questionnaire (University of Grenoble, France).
While preparing this article, the author used ChatGPT.5.2 to help improve alignment with the British Council’s Style Guide. The author then reviewed and edited the content as needed and takes full responsibility for the final published version.
Learn more about this topic on our TeachingEnglish website.
- Reference: Plutchik, R. (1980). A general psychoevolutionary theory of emotion. In R. Plutchik & H. Kellerman (Eds.), Emotion: Theory, research, and experience: Vol. 1. Theories of emotion (pp. 3-33). New York: Academic.
