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What can captions do?
TV captions create an unrivaled opportunity for viewers to connect printed words with the sound of our language, transforming a TV set into an educational tool to help beginning or struggling learners to read.
TV captions will read the words for programs from pre-schoolers’ nursery stories to movies to the evening news, from sit-coms to political speeches and sports events.
Captions are available on virtually all programs, on both network and cable stations. They are available 20 out of 24 hours a day (not from 2 am to 6 am) all year long.
All it takes is to open the existing closed TV captions to show the printed words as they are being spoken. The sound helps the learner to decipher the print.
When captions are opened and visible, TV creates an unrivaled opportunity for a learner to connect the sight of the printed words with the sound of our language in the context of the action of the stories unfolding on the screen. The movement adds an extra dimension over the experience of having a story read from a static printed book.
Seeing the printed words while they are spoken, learners have an experience closely comparable to having stories read aloud to them.
Best of all, opening the closed captions is absolutely free.
Sometimes you hear that children watch too much television. Limiting viewing of inappropriate programs for young viewers is logical. Limiting TV may be good advice for those who already know how to read well.
However, television does not have to be the enemy of reading. Literacy does not begin or end in a classroom.
Captions transform television from a mindless distraction into a reading tutor. When told to turn on its captions, television becomes a teaching tool that can read tirelessly to its audience for hours on end.
If you have learners in your home, turn on TV captions for them.
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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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