Same-Language-Subtitling
I'm a special education teacher in Hawaii, and very interested in subject of literacy. A few years ago I came across a very simple idea for improving the literacy amongst struggling reader populations. (In reality the majority of USA High School students are ‘struggling readers with Reading below 7th Grade Equivalencies)
The format is called Same-Language-Subtitling (SLS). SLS is the use of Synchronized Captioning of Musical Lyrics (or any text with an Audio/Video/ source) as a Repeated Reading activity.
The application has many possibilities in both television and in education.
This approach to enriching reading is legitimate --Google gave a 25 million dollar grant to the India based study: http://planetread.org/home.php and the OLPC program has a version of program with music pre-loaded on their laptops.
This format includes not only the viewing and responding to subtitled media but also the opportunity for students to design and create their own surtitled projects. For class activities we use a free program called Karafun (www.karafun.com) My students really love it, it is easy, intuitive, and can use any mp3, jpeg, or even .avi to rapidly make dynamic syllabicated subtitling. My students also use it with poetry and famous speech.
You can see samples of my student's karaoke projects at my study web site: www.sls4reading.com, just look for SLS samples: Musicals and Other Genres.
The only U.S. educational use I know of (besides my classroom and study) is:
“Tune-into-Reading”, a “learn to read while learning to sing” program. They can be found at: http://www.elpcorp.com/
SLS has enormous educational potential --even if just added to MTV.
Thanks for reading this and I hope you will consider some of these ideas for exploration. For further info please access and explore:
Greg McCall , Hawaii:
Dr Brij Kotari, India:
http://planetread.org/home.php
http://desilassi.com/index.php
(Explanation) http://desilassi.com/about_us.
Dr. Susan Homan, Florida:
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