Read My Lips: How Lockdown TV Could Boost Children's Literacy (theguardian.com) 43
An urgent call is to go out to children's television broadcasters this weekend, backed by major names in British entertainment, politics and technology. From a report: Writer and performer Stephen Fry, best-selling author Cressida Cowell and businesswoman Martha Lane Fox are joined by former children's television presenter Floella Benjamin as signatories to a letter, carried in today's Observer, that urges all leading streaming, network and terrestrial children's channels to make one simple change to boost literacy among the young: turn on the subtitles. If English-language subtitles were to be run along the bottom of the screen for all programming, they argue, reading levels across the country would automatically rise. Longstanding international academic research projects prove, they say, that spelling, grammar and vocabulary would all be enhanced, even if children watching TV are not aware they are learning.
The campaign aims to improve reading ability across the English-speaking world and has won backing from former President Bill Clinton, who said: "Same-language subtitling doubles the number of functional readers among primary school children. It's a small thing that has a staggering impact on people's lives." The drive is being run by a campaign group called Tots, or Turn On The Subtitles, and launches this week. The open letter to broadcasters from the organization, founded by old friends and entrepreneurs Henry Warren and Oli Barrett, draws attention to the benefits of featuring same-language subtitles as a default on programming aimed at children across the world -- almost a billion of whom are now being educated inside their own homes.
The campaign aims to improve reading ability across the English-speaking world and has won backing from former President Bill Clinton, who said: "Same-language subtitling doubles the number of functional readers among primary school children. It's a small thing that has a staggering impact on people's lives." The drive is being run by a campaign group called Tots, or Turn On The Subtitles, and launches this week. The open letter to broadcasters from the organization, founded by old friends and entrepreneurs Henry Warren and Oli Barrett, draws attention to the benefits of featuring same-language subtitles as a default on programming aimed at children across the world -- almost a billion of whom are now being educated inside their own homes.
Doubtful it'll be that easy... (Score:2, Insightful)
Clearly you've never read the closed captioning on most programs. They're hardly a shining example of excellent spelling or proper grammar. Sometimes it's because commonly spoken English rarely mirrors the expectations placed upon written English, other times it's just plain failure by the closed-captioning operator. Live programs are particularly bad at this.
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Most TVs already support showing closed captioning. I'm not sure what the original post is trying to suggest...
The summary isn't clear, but the article says that what they want is for captioning to be on by default. Viewers can still turn subtitles off if they prefer.
Fine with me. My spouse is a non-native English speaker and I have some hearing loss so we watch everything with the captioning on anyway.
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Most TVs already support showing closed captioning. I'm not sure what the original post is trying to suggest.... Ruin all TV by putting permanent text on top?
You should try living in another country for a while and realise that much of the world is perfectly fine with "ruined" TV.
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It's not just the kids...
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You mean not doing dipshit things like including "able" and "capability" in the same convoluted shitty sentence?
Spanish should be banned. That's a much more succinct way of saying what you actually meant.
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That only works for broadcast TV and only when carried through analog cabling since closed captions are carried on line 21. If you have a cable box or other streaming thing and connect to it via HDMI, the closed caption decoder no longer functions (since HDMI has no equivalent line 21, and use of the blanking intervals hasn't been proposed). Instead yo
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You can still receive captions via cable or satellite. Instead of being decoded and displayed on the TV, the decoding and display is simply handled on the cable or satellite receiver. If you have Comcast's Xfinity X1, you press the A button on the remote to get to the accessibility menu.
Re: Doubtful it'll be that easy... (Score:2)
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It's not nearly as bad as it used to be. Pretty darn accurate for the vast majority of the time.
Captions are generated by voice-to-text neural nets and then cleaned up by human workers. VR tech is WAY better than even a few years ago.
The humans doing the final pass are usually in either India or the Philippines. Indians sometimes screw up Americanisms and will spell words like colour and honour with an extra U. Filipinos don't make those mistakes, but they sometimes reverse F and P. So you will get weird phrases like "For dinner tonight, we had roast beep."
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"Filipinos don't make those mistakes, but they sometimes reverse F and P. So you will get weird phrases like "For dinner tonight, we had roast beep."
What did you have for dinner? ..Or was it just mutton or lamb?
Roast Feep?
Roast Peep?
Poast Beep?
Foast Feep?
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Clearly you've never read the closed captioning on most programs. They're hardly a shining example of excellent spelling or proper grammar. Sometimes it's because commonly spoken English rarely mirrors the expectations placed upon written English, other times it's just plain failure by the closed-captioning operator. Live programs are particularly bad at this.
I think the idea is that it would be added to things like pre-recorded movies, tv shows, etc. As you say, live, transcribed captions are horrible. But the captions that usually come with movies (at least in the consumer market) are pretty good.
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I would say that they're variable. At one point I worked flexitime and shared a house with two people who didn't, and I commonly watched films on mute with subtitles while eating dinner at 01:00. It was an interesting challenge to try to read the lips and combine that with the subtitles to figure out what they were actually saying. Most of the time the subtitles abbreviate, and occasionally they lose an important detail by so doing.
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and I cite Msmash as mother-fucking evidence.
What has TV got to do with a poorly programmed perl script?
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What has TV got to do with a poorly programmed perl script?
He/she/it regularly manages to achieve "heights of stupidity" that mere lines of code can only aspire to.
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Is there any evidence that grammar errors and misspelling alters the literacy rate? If I read something that sounds wrong, doesn't that mean I've acquired the skills necessary to distinguish the difference?
Re: Doubtful it'll be that easy... (Score:2)
Re: Doubtful it'll be that easy... (Score:1)
Either is valid.
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When I was in the US, I've noticed that captions were frequently delayed on non-live broadcasts by up to 7 seconds, missing 2-3 letters randomly, had spelling errors, and on some movies (Alice in Wonderland comes to mind) the captions were different from the actual dialog.
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This. Most of them are entered via phonetic chord keyboards, and may get words wrong because they are done in one pass, even if it's not a live show, because it's usually not worth paying someone for the extra time it takes to edit them. It can get even worse on news broadcasts, since whoever is doing the transcription may not know all of the words involved. And then there are the problems with timing and encoding/formatting (the version of MythTV that I use usually wrecks the formatting).
But it is still b
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Don't they already have the text the newsreader's reading from?
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Closed Captioning and Subtitles are different things. Closed Captioning includes information on sounds, like whistling, music, or a door being slammed, whereas subtitles only include dialogue. My experience in Taiwan and Japan is that this is already done. Every show has subtitles on them. I don't know if you can even turn them off.
Damn Trump (Score:1)
I'll bet he never even considered this. At least we still have Clinton I to give us good ideas.
I did that with my kids (Score:4, Interesting)
I turned on closed captioning when my kids were young and they didn't know how to turn it off. They both turned out great and literate. I wish my folks had that option for me when I was a wee kid. It doesn't replace books, reading to your kids or modelling reading behaviour.
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I just turned captions on since youngest is learning to read. Second-youngest immediately protested, on the grounds of having already learned to read. Sigh.
Re:I did that with my kids (Score:5, Insightful)
When I immigrated, watching TV with closed captioning was a huge help with learning and refining my English, especially conversational usage. It was a bonus that I could enjoy Seinfeld and learn at the same time.
LOL, no, 'limit screen time' still applies (Score:2)
Last I heard 'limit screen time' still applies to TV as well as computers and tablets, so how about we get them to read actual books instead, mmkay? Especially the young ones who are still learning to read.
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You need an audio reference when you're learning to read, especially with the English language where pronunciation of letters is inconsistent even within the same word. Deaf people in particular have many literacy problems because of this.
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Screen time is a slogan for the technically illiterate to cover up their illiteracy. It is like yelling about seat time. The bicycle is a technological monstrosity that makes people lazy they should walk. No child s
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Small children should not be spending much time at all with 'screens'; that's a well-established fact of early childhood development.
No one said "NO SCREEN TIME AT ALL!", they said LIMIT it.
Children should be reading books. Their teachers, and their parents should be spending time helping them with that. Not 'screens', and not 'closed captioning on TV'. That's just silly.
Bicycles are fun and good exercise. Kids like bikes. Your
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We can see now that kids are out of school, and their parents have no idea how to handle computer based education, that there is a great deal of illiteracy. The internet is full of great learning sites for kids of all ages, and tools they need for college and work and life, and parents are ju
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Everything worked out just fine for me therefore it has to work out just fine for every kid on the planet!
LOL.
Meanwhile have you considered how much more intelligent, talented, productive, and successful you might have been if you hadn't been glued to a TV screen or computer monitor your entire childhood? And how you might not be as fat, weak, and diseased as you probably are if you'd gone outside to play and ride a bike, instead of sitting inside staring at a screen?
Go right ahead and get all indignant now. The more indignant you get over this the more convinced I am that I'm right.
Of all the people I never expected to see... (Score:2)
... referenced on Slashdot.
Floella Benjamin
My 1980s just exploded.
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She's aged a lot less than I have.
Contradictio in terminis (Score:1)
Whose subtitles? (Score:2)
I can't tell you how often subtitles are wrong, misleading, or have grammar, spelling, or punctuation errors. I don't what they expect kids to learn, but it's not proper English.
subtitles for foreign language programs (Score:2)