October 2002

THE IDIOT-BOX TURNS INTO A TEACHER... AND ENTERTAINS BETTER

Can music-videos on TV herald a revolution in literacy? Yes, believes a young researcher Dr Brij Kothari, who after years of struggling is finally getting a chance to take his ideas forward once again on a wider national level across India.

By Frederick Noronha

Third World Network Features

Can music-videos on TV herald a revolution in literacy? Yes, believes a young researcher Dr Brij Kothari*, who after years of struggling is finally getting a chance to take his ideas forward once again on a wider national level across India.

Simply put, the innovative approach that Kothari has been propounding relies on getting neo-literates to do some reading, and deepen their skills, even while they are glued to the 'idiot box' watching film-related entertainment. According to Kothari this can be done by subtitling the lyrics of the existing song-based programming on TV in the same language as the audio.

There is, in fact, an easy and cost-effective way of doing this... though convincing decision-makers might be the more difficult part of the job. This is the experience that has emerged from experiments conducted in regional pockets of western India.

India's impossible problem is that even though the country's literacy rate is rising, it is a well-known fact that the actual literacy skill levels remain very low among half the people whom our census considers to be literate. In other words, one-third of India's population is fully literate, one-third non-literate and one-third at early stages of literacy (but not functionally literate).

Kothari calls his method 'same-language subtitling' (SLS). Conventional subtitling has  meant  transcribing  and  translating  the dialogue  in  a  different  language from the original, mainly to allow an audience to understand a film in a language other than what it was originally made in. In SLS, however, the subtitling is done in the same language. For instance, the lyrics of Hindi songs appear in Hindi, Tamil songs in Tamil, and so on in any language. The synchronisation of audio and text is created through colour changes in the subtitles, identifying every word as it is being sung.

Subconsciously, neo-literates who are watching follow the text, and sing along, thus strengthening their reading skills even as they enjoy the music. In this manner, same- language subtitling is shown to have strengthened grapheme-phoneme associations which are weak in 'early literate people'.

Says Kothari: 'The main objective of the SLS project is to weave reading transactions into everyday popular entertainment so that reading skill improvement can become a by-product of what people already do, watch TV!  What we are finding is that SLS actually enhances the entertainment value of song-based programming while also creating a context in which reading and writing practice is encouraged.'

This SLS project was conceived six years ago and has been financed by different agencies at various stages.  The major funders in the past have been the Indian government's Ministry of HRD (Dept. of Education), DECU-Indian Space Research Organisation in Ahmedabad, and Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. UNESCO (Delhi) too made a contribution at the beginning of the project.

Over the past few years, Kothari has shown that this method helps to strengthen the reading skills of neo-literates. It ensures that people who have been taught literacy skills don't simply lose the same, but instead allows for their literacy skills to grow.

In August 2002, Kothari and team decided to go ahead with an 'Independence from Illiteracy through TV' by putting 'an old ICT (information and communication technology) to new ends'. He said that on the eve of India's Independence Day - 15 August  2002 - an experiment is underway by Doordarshan and the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad to contribute to making every Indian independently literate.

Film-music based 'Chitrahaar' is India's longest running film-based programme in the history of television. It is especially popular in the villages. In this way, Kothari hopes to transform India's 'staple entertainment to edutainment that is "more" entertaining'.

This counter-intuitive use of the TV was first proposed six years ago. Research has since been conducted in three separate experiments at the classroom, village (on local cable) and state (in Gujarat) levels. Educationists say findings have been consistent that reading ability improves steadily as a result of viewing film- and folksong-based content with the addition of same-language subtitling.

'What is perhaps more relevant to network acceptance of the idea is that surveys have found that over 99% of viewers, semi-literate and literate alike, actually prefer song programming with SLS than without,' says Kothari.

Why so? Viewers have been video-taped in villages and slums trying to sing along through lip-synching.  Same-language subtitling enables viewers to know the song lyrics, 'hear' the words better (useful not just for the hearing but also the hearing- challenged or deaf), and write down the lyrics.

Ironically, it costs a pittance to implement such a scheme. Experiments in the western Indian state of Gujarat have shown that such work costs just a few paise per person, when done over a large area. Same-language subtitling integrates everyday reading-writing transactions into the lives of 500 million TV viewers in India at a cost of 3 paise (US$0.0065) per person per year, according to Kothari.

Commented Gianni Giacomelli, an Italian interested in this idea: 'The idea is so beautifully simple and cost-effective that may well be a breakthrough. We used SLS in the West for a few years for the deaf and as a learning tool for foreign students, but Indian application for adult literacy is a quantum leap.'

SLS was awarded the Best Social Innovation for the year 2000 from The Institute for Social Inventions, London (UK). - Third World Network Features

* Brij Kothari is associate professor at the IIMA's Ravi J Matthai Centre for Educational Innovation. He can be contacted via email: brij@iimahd.ernet.in

About the writer: Frederick Noronha is a Goa-based freelance journalist with an interest in developmental issues. He is co-founder of bytesforall.org and can be contacted at fred@bytesforall.org

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