By Parthibhan Amudhan | General Manager
Same Language Subtitling (SLS) is simply the idea of subtitling existing Bollywood film songs on TV, in the same language as the audio. The lyrics of Hindi songs subtitled in Hindi. Tamil songs subtitled in Tamil and so on in all languages.
SLS is deceptively simple for what it can do. In India, 800 million people -- children, youth, and adults -- watch on average two hours of TV a day. A significant portion of the content consumed is song-based, including, film, folk and devotional songs. If all the songs were "Karaoke-ized" with the addition of SLS, 800 million viewers, half of whom are weak readers, would get automatic reading practice, every day and lifelong.
From June 2013 to May 2015, nearly two years, PlanetRead added SLS on all the songs of 10 weekly Marathi movies
telecast in prime time, on Zee Talkies, the state’s most popular 24 x 7 Marathi movie channel. The song-subtitled
movies were further repeat-telecasted in other slots on Zee Talkies and on Zee Marathi, also the state’s most popular Marathi general entertainment channel.
Together, this resulted in an unprecedented scale up of SLS in the Maharashtra, far more than even the project had planned for or anticipated.
Did the SLS scale up in Maharashtra have any impact on school children’s reading skills in the state? Yes! we are happy to share with you the results of the impact study that was conducted independently by Pratham. Please read the attached document for a detailed report and find below the main findings:
Generally, Grade 3 is a good point to assess a school system’s deliverance of reading skills. The trajectory of further reading skill development and educational progress is to a large extent determined by what has transpired by the end of Grade 3. So we took a snapshot of Grade 3 reading skills in Maharashtra, at the baseline (June 2013) and the endline (May 2015). In Maharashtra, 30.5% more children in Grade 3 progressed to Grade 1 reading ability. In Gujarat, only 2.1% did. Overall, we have seen that there is a 10% to 14% more children were able to experience marked improvements in the reading skills.
Links:
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