Educational Uses
Top Five Advantages of Captions in the Classroom
1. Improves Reading Comprehension
On average, kids spend over 30 hours a week watching television. By turning on captions, parents can turn those entertainment hours into learning hours. A 1984 NCI study showed that hearing youngsters who watched captioned TV were able to significantly improve their vocabulary and oral reading fluency. While children are watching cartoons, videos, and sitcoms, they can also be reading the captions -- making it an interactive experience.
2. Greatly Benefits ESL Students and Teachers
Numerous studies on teaching English as a Second Language and actual accounts relayed by ESL instructors have all come to the same conclusion: captioned television improves reading and listening comprehension, vocabulary, word recognition and overall motivation to read among students who are learning English as a second language.
More specifically, reading captions helps ESL students differentiate between homophones (ate vs eight), syntax (arrangement of words in a sentence) between their first language and the new language, helps decipher accents and dialects, and much more!
3. Boosts Confidence and Literacy in Students with Learning Disabilities
For children and adults with learning disabilities, captioned television helps improve comprehension as well as increasing self-confidence. Prior preparation, including class discussion and related hand-out materials coupled with captions that highlighted important keywords resulted in the overall highest performance.
Studies show that subtitles and captioning can help strengthen the reading skills of students with learning disabilities and struggling readers with improvement in reading comprehension, oral reading rates, word recognition, vocabulary acquisition, decoding, and reading speed and fluency.
4. Enhances Test Scores
Captions in educational videos have been shown to improve student GPAs, helping students focus more and take better notes. The overall boost in vocabulary and reading comprehension translates directly into student testing confidence and higher test scores!
5. The Law Requires It
Educational and training videos that are offered to students, employees, and the public in general are required to have captioning, per both the American Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. In addition, Section 508 is a federal law that requires agencies, schools included, to provide individuals with disabilities equal access to electronic information and data comparable to those who do not have disabilities, unless an undue burden would be imposed on the agency.
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