I'm a special education teacher in Hawaii, and very interested in subject of literacy. I  teach Special Education English Literature and Reading.  From my beginning days as a teacher I was shocked at how little time secondary students actually spend in reading activities. I watched teachers struggling to keep students in class and on task. I began to look for ways to take advantage of my students strengths

---A few years ago I came across a very simple idea for improving the literacy amongst struggling reader populations.

(Please note that the majority of USA High School students are ‘struggling readers' with reading performance below  7th G.E.)

The format is called Same-Language-Subtitling (SLS). SLS is the use of Synchronized Captioning of Musical Lyrics (or any text with an Audio/Video/ source) as a Repeated Reading activity.

The application has many possibilities in both television and in education. This approach to enriching reading is legitimate --Google gave a 25 million dollar grant to the India based study: http://planetread.org/home.php and the OLPC program has a version of program with music pre-loaded on their laptops.

This format includes not only the viewing and responding to subtitled media but also the opportunity for students to design and create their own surtitled projects. For class activities we use a free program called Karafun (www.karafun.com) My students really love it, it is easy, intuitive, and can use any mp3, jpeg, or even .avi to rapidly make dynamic syllabicated subtitling. My students also use it with poetry and famous speech.

You can see samples of my student's karaoke projects at my study web site: www.sls4reading.com, just look for SLS samples: Musicals and Other Genres.

The only U.S. educational use I know of (besides my classroom and study) is:“Tune-into-Reading”, a “learn to read while learning to sing” program. They can be found at: http://www.elpcorp.com/content.cfm?page_id=187 They are same company that does the "Carry-A-Tune SingingCoach" program.

SLS has enormous educational potential --even if just added to MTV.

Thanks for reading this and I hope you will consider some of these ideas for exploration.

For further info please access and explore:

Greg McCall , Hawaii:

www.sls4reading.com

Dr Brij Kotari, India:

http://planetread.org/home.php

www.Bookbox.com

http://desilassi.com/index.php

(Explanation) http://desilassi.com/about_us.php

Dr. Susan Homan, Florida:

http://www.elpcorp.com/content.cfm?page_id=187

My educational background is a little mixed; I have professional degrees in Special Education and Reading Instruction and Undergraduate and Master’s Studies in Theater from the University of Hawaii. I earned my Master's in Curriculum and Technology in 2005 from the University of Phoenix. I have spent a good deal of time studying the impact of captioned audio and video on reading growth.Now I work with computers and technology. I love teaching reading. Most of the kids that I work with come to me with almost a hatred for reading tasks, and I get to help them find the joy of reading. I get to play work with Harry Potter and William Shakespeare, how much better can life get?