by Lorna Irwin, Idaho H&V.
Many years ago, I was sitting in a workshop for parents, listening to another mother of a deaf child extoll the virtues of closed captioning. She felt that it had been one of the primary factors behind her deaf son’s success with reading, and that it had not only boosted his vocabulary but had introduced him to a lot of idioms and trivia he would otherwise have missed. Before having children, we’d decided to keep television viewing limited in an effort to raise bookworms rather than couch potatoes. It was pretty evident from her presentation that her son watched way more television than my daughter did! —were we missing the boat?
In the 1980s, getting captions on television meant buying a separate caption decoder, and tuning into the few programs that had captions. PBS was captioning most of their content, commercial stations did some, and the Disney Channel was dragging their feet. Before my daughter could read, she saw words on the screen and began to associate their presence with people’s mouths moving. Her parents were enjoying other benefits, notably watching Masterpiece Theater and other British imports and understanding the dialogue. When she had a little reading under her belt, I figured out a way to burn open captions onto a VHS tape by connecting the decoder upstream from the VCR and taping off the air. When playing that tape, we could pause it and take as much time as we needed to read the captions (the decoder box had some kind of circuitry that erased them after a few seconds). We enjoyed watching “The Voyage of the Mimi” (a PBS series featuring science, nature, adventure, and a Deaf character using ASL) together, then I basically turned her loose. Books were still our primary written language-based entertainment, but we also learned that television dramatizations of books could spark interest in the original material.
Captions are far easier to access today, and more familiar to the general public. In 1990, the Television Decoder Circuitry Act mandated built-in decoders for all televisions 13 inches and larger. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 empowered the FCC to make rules which require most programs to be captioned; this was extended to videos on the internet that had been previously captioned on television, or that resembled live television, in 2010. Consumer-generated media such as YouTube videos are exempt, but more and more platforms are adding auto-generated captions. These still have significant room for improvement, but even lousy captions beat no captions when it comes to accessibility.
After 40 years of captions becoming more and more common, what’s the low-down on captions and reading development? Interestingly, much of what I found concerned captions and hearing children and adults. Two stories are frequently repeated. One is the educational success story that is Finland; although their standing has slipped a bit in recent years, they still out-perform most other countries of the world. There are a multitude of reasons for this, which basically boil down to a high regard for education, but slipped in there is the fact that Finland does not dub foreign television shows in Finnish, but instead subtitles them. Finnish children read a lot more television than children elsewhere.
In 2001, India started adding karaoke-style subtitles to Bollywood films on television. Adults and children alike started singing along, writing down lyrics, memorizing them, and reading levels rose for both age groups.
More formal studies with hearing students find that films shown with captions keep students more focused and improve comprehension and are especially helpful for new vocabulary acquisition. Videos with captions can be used to “ease” reluctant readers and beginning readers into more reading; they are more motivating and less intimidating than text-heavy materials. Captions are useful, but not a cure-all. They can’t teach reading from scratch. They work best for students who are in the early stages of literacy. A potential pitfall is that videos must be seen as fun and entertainment rather than learning, a quality which could get lost if they are used as a major component of classroom education—but this is exactly where captions at home fit into the picture.
I found less information about children who are deaf or hard of hearing and captioning. The primary focus here is on access. Deaf students’ ability to use captions to understand video materials is associated with their reading grade level; on the other hand, having video significantly improves comprehension of captions as opposed to reading just the captions or a transcript. It stands to reason that children who have some hearing will, to some extent, experience the power of spoken and written language appearing together, as hearing children do. Children who are hearing little or nothing would be having an experience similar to that of Finnish children reading their own language while hearing another. It also improves access for all deaf and hard of hearing children and adults, and for this reason alone, captions should always be “on” at home, and specified as accommodations in IEPs and 504 plans! Any boost they give to reading skills is a bonus.
Last year, the Idaho State Legislature passed a resolution encouraging venues to turn on captioning for televisions in waiting rooms and other public areas. While SCR 102 does not carry the force of a law, it does send a message that can be passed on whenever you see a television running without captions. The full text of the resolution can be found at: https://legislature.idaho.gov/wp-content/uploads/sessioninfo/2021/legislation/SCR102.pdf. ~
H&V Communicator – Spring 2022