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Guidance For Parents
All education experts recognize that reading to a young child is one of the best ways to encourage literacy.And certainly parents should read to their children as often as possible, ideally 15 minutes each night as the child is nestled in bed.
However, reading aloud can be supplemented by turning on, and leaving on, the closed captions that are hidden in our television sets. Numerous studies have shown that the use of TV captions can help beginning or struggling readers.
There are many television programs directed at small children with simple stories and simple language. With TV captions turned on the child can see the printed words of the story on the screen, while hearing the sound of the words. Even with no parent intervention, beyond being sure that the subtitles are on, TV captions can help to teach reading.
But, if a parent has time, captions can become an even more important learning tool. For example, sitting down with a program recorded with captions on your VCR permits you and your children to see, hear and read a program, and then play it again with stops at important words to test your children’s knowledge.
You can ask your child to define a word or define it yourself for your child for him or give him time to ask questions about the story and the words in it.
Ask your children questions about what is happening in the story or what is likely to happen next.
As your child progresses, you may wish to turn down the sound so that he or she has to rely on the printed captions to follow the story.You may ask the child to read along with the captions on the screen, or retell the story after it is over in his own words.
When a program is not prerecorded with the captions in place, the words of the captions may lag behind the sounds and some of the words may be misspelled. Can your child recognize a misspelling? Can she spell the word correctly?
Guidance For Teachers - Leverage Your Effectiveness
Of course, TV subtitles do not take the place of teachers. Captions are a supplement, not a substitute for teachers. But watching TV as it shows the printed words as they are being spoken can leverage the effectiveness of teachers.
If, for example, a teacher holds the one and only book being read from, the pupils in that classroom have either no chance or a very limited chance to see the printed words as they are being read by the teacher.
However, instead of reading every story aloud in the classroom, a teacher may either choose a TV program to assign as homework to watch with the subtitles turned on or, from a list of available, age-appropriate TV programs, let the students decide on which one would be their homework that they would watch after school, usually at home, with the subtitles turned on.
This would be the students’ assignment to prepare for the next lesson. Then, having seen the subtitles on television, the students and the teacher would have a common base line from which to discuss and analyze the assignment.
Ultimately, the use of TV subtitles should leave more classroom time available for teachers to focus on other important elements of reading such as phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, spelling, syntax, grammar, comprehension, composition and other aspects of learning a language that cannot be so easily mechanized. |
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CAPTIONS for LITERACY, a Section 501 (c) (3) charitable trust
351 East 84th Street 22 B, New York, NY 10028-4457, telephone 1-212-861-9683, fax 1-212-861-0030
CaptionsForLiteracy.org |
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