Help Your Learning Reader by Turning on TV Subtitles
For many parents, the question is not, whether the increased screen time for our children in the past year, and to what extent. It’s easy to feel guilty about the many hours our kids spent with their faces buried in the screen, watching another Odd Squad marathon. But there is an easy way to make nonsensical TV viewing more educational: turn on subtitles.
My husband and I have always enjoyed using subtitles while watching TV shows so that we can turn down the volume without missing any dialogue. Because of this, subtitles almost always come on when my son tunes in for a show too. Back in the days before he could read – and even in the earliest stages of reading – signatures were an annoying distraction from watching TV. But around the time his reading skills really started to improve, I noticed that he stopped complaining about the signatures and stopped asking me to turn them off. He watched and read at the same time, reinforcing what he had learned in school.
English actor and comedianStephen Fry alsosupports this method :
Of course, if you’ve ever watched TV with subtitles turned on, you know this isn’t a perfect system. It can be annoying when words appear before the characters speak them, or if there is a long delay between the spoken words and their subsequent appearance on the screen. Also, my son once watched SpongeBob SquarePants , but the captions on the screen were for another show and the words “I’m a wild card! I’m a wild card! “Kept appearing over and over again.
“I thought,“ Okay, you’re a wild card, I get it, ”my son recalls. But overall, he said, the signatures helped him learn new words and helped him form more difficult words. (In particular, he went through a major phase in Star Wars: The Clone Wars , in which he learned how to spell names like Ahsoka.)
Aside from my own anecdotal experiences – and support from Stephen Fry – there are also studies that show that reading subtitles can improve literacy in early childhood. According to the Turn Subtitles Campaign:
A key takeaway from the gaze-tracking study of automatic reading in children and adults is that viewers with some decoding ability – even partial alphanumeric matching – simply cannot ignore the subtitles and will exhibit automatic reading responses.
I am not suggesting that television captions are a substitute for reading actual books ( be sure to keep reading for your kids ), but turning on captions is an easy way to help kids boost words of recognition.
This article was originally published in 2019. It was updated on March 1, 2021 to reflect current information and style.