Could India use Bollywood to improve literacy!

For the 400 million "illiterate" citizens in India, TV has emerged as an educational tool. And for India, like many of the world's developing nations, literacy is crucial to fuelling economic success. There's little opportunity of reinforcing reading skills outside school. So to make functional readers out of the struggling ones, PlanetRead came up with a simple idea of adding "same language subtitling" (SLS) to film songs for the country's movie-hungry population. The subtitling is karaoke-style: words are highlighted as lyrics scroll by. Viewers read in the same language that they hear. (Ten of India's regional languages are available.) As most Indian film tracks have repetitive lyrics, audiences get a chance to practise reading the same words again and again. "The reading engagement takes place, not because the TV viewer is consciously trying to read along the songs, but because the brain automatically registers consistent associations between sound and text," says Brij Kothari, founder of PlanetRead. More here

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