SLS: innovation which caters to fight Illiteracy

clipped from www.worldchanging.com

After our recent post on the use of Bollywood style film for instructional videos, we got a note about a kindred educational tool, applying same language subtitles (SLS) to films as a way to improve literacy -- not a brand new method, but a brilliantly simple and effective one. According to PlanetRead, one of the pioneering organizations in this field, SLS was first introduced on Indian television in 1999, broadcast with Bollywood songs. The visual association of written words with familiar song lyrics proved incredibly successful, making the process automatic and subconscious, as well as cost-effective. They found that "every US dollar spent on subtitling a nationally telecast program of Hindi film songs, gives 30 minutes of weekly reading practice to 10,000 people, for a year."