Dr.Brij Kothari: 

            is an Indian academic and a social entrepreneur.  He pioneered Same language subtitling on Indian TV for mass literacy in India. He is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur, and did his Ph.d at Cornell University. He is an Ashoka Fellow, a Stanford/Reuters Digital Vision Fellow. He is an Adjunct Faculty at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He is the president of PlanetRead, a non-profit involved in furthering SLS throughout the world. He is also founder of BookBox (a social venture).
             Dr. Kothari coined the term Same-Language-Subtitling in 1996 to describe his application of Karaoke-styled captioning.  Kothari pioneered SLS using Bollywood film songs on TV to promote literacy in India. His massive SLS study has received awards from the Tech Museum of Innovation (San Jose), Development Marketplace (World Bank), and the Institute for Social Inventions (London). His project has major financial support from the Google Foundation and the OLPC group has plans for incorporating his application into their educational package. Between 1997 and 2002, Dr Kothari made countless attempts to persuade Doordarshan (the public television broadcaster of India and a division of Prasar Bharati, (a public service broadcaster nominated by the Government of India. It is one of the largest broadcasting organizations in the world in terms of the infrastructure of studios and transmitters) to allow him to subtitle film songs on TV. Each time he was thrown out of their offices. In 1999, a new director at the Ahmedabad Kendra (one of the central broadcasting channels) agreed to experiment with subtitles on four episodes of the Gujarati programme, Chitrageet. It created such a sensation that they had to continue it for a year.

            Kothari’s current application of SLS is an ongoing experimental presentation continuing on Indian National TV. Basically, they take popular movie music and add strong subtitling. Two nationally telecast Hindi film song programs (Chitrahaar and Rangoli) are used with the SLS format to provide reading practice for at least an hour per week to hopefully more than 100 million struggling and emergent readers. His current usage of SLS uses newspaper response puzzles and mail-in contests to engage the viewing audience with the musical texts.  Kothari’s current study has revisited more than 13,000 non-readers and early-readers both children and adults, randomly drawn from five Indian states, over a six year period first in 2001 as a baseline and then again in 2003, and recently in 2007. All three surveys were done independently by Nielsen’s ORG-Centre for Social Research, and applied the same reading and writing assessment tools to the same individuals.

Greg McCall:

            is a secondary school teacher and has worked with technology, theater and special education. He has experimented with classroom use of music lyrics and subtitling since 1993. His papers detail his usage of SLS or Subtitled-Music-Video as a repeated reading exercise. Mr. McCall’s format (or basic SLS exercise) has students on a daily basis repeatedly viewing brief excerpts of Broadway musical videos with dynamic subtitles while completing cloze-style worksheets. As much as possible students work through an entire musical over a six week period. This activity then transitions to students using Karafun, a karaoke program, to create and prepare the SLS activities for class.

Susan Homan:

            is a Professor of Education at the University of South Florida has researched the Tune-in-to-Reading program for the past four years. Through her study, funded by the Florida Department of Education, she found that students using TUNEin improved an average of one reading level per nine-week cycle if they used the program for 90 minutes a week. "I've been unable to find any other intervention that has been consistently successful in helping struggling readers make reading gains that are this impressive," Homan said. The program has been implemented in schools nationwide. Franzblau said it can be difficult to rally support for the program because it's such a different technique for teaching children to read. "We have to find those educators who are willing to take a little bit of a risk to try something new and different," he said.

            The Tune-In-To-Reading format combines Learn-to-Sing software with a reading practice program, this is an individualized application of Karaoke and Reading practice.

Alice Arnstad Killackey  Ph.D.: 

             University of Mexico created the AVAILLL program which incorporates popular DVD's and subtitling in a series of fun, interactive literacy lessons to promote joy and motivation while developing skills in comprehension, vocabulary and fluency in reading. The stunning research results have recently been replicated by a research team at the University of Canterbury and are available online at www.availll.com:

Researchers from the University of Canterbury's School of Literacies and Arts in Education have just trialed a US-based reading programme in six Christchurch schools. Struggling readers who took part in the programme improved their reading age by 1.2 years in just six weeks. The patented programme, called Audio Visual Achievement in Literacy, Language and Learning (AVAILLL), is based on the use of movie subtitles to support literacy activities. Low achieving students in primary schools are enticed into books through "read-watching" of popular movies that are themselves based on books. The programme builds on research undertaken in 1992 by UC Emeritus Professor Warwick Elley. Professor Elley analysed the results of the International Education Assessment study of reading literacy and discovered that heavy watching of subtitled TV for students in five of the top performing countries may be a variable that contributed to higher results.

Géry van Outryve d'Ydewalle:

            is a Belgian scientist and professor of the Laboratory for experimental psychology at the  Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Leuven). In 1992, he was awarded the Francqui Prize on Human Sciences. A study by d'Ydewalle (1991) conclusively demonstrates that all readers (including illiterate, emergent, and struggling readers) will consciously, and unconsciously, track text on the video screen. In other words, the student’s eyes will register the text, even if the student is not intentionally trying to read the captioning.

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