Same-Language-Subtitling and Karaoke:
The Use of Subtitled Music as a Reading Activity
In a High School Special Education Classroom
W.Greg McCall
2005
Results: Increasing Reading Time
Increasing Reading Time
This study examined whether the addition of video based Same-Language-Subtitled (SLS) music lyrics as a supplementary reading activity could positively impact the problem of low reading growth in a high school special education English classroom. The goals of the study included: increasing overall time per class that students participated in a reading activity, increasing student engagement in reading activities, and improving reading growth rate.
Classroom activities were monitored by the Special Education Staff before the intervention period and during the last four weeks of the intervention. For the Intervention Group, average weekly reading activity times increased from 95 minutes to 105 minutes per week. When the SLS activity (90 minutes or 28%) is combined with class reading activities (105 minutes or 32%), total reading related activities increased from 29% to 60% of class time available, or from 95 minutes per week to 195 minutes per week. The following table (Table 1) provides a summary of classroom time spent weekly on various activities.
Based on minutes per week spent on reading tasks, the SLS activity did not take time away from classroom reading activities. The following table (Table 2) provides a more detailed analysis of averaged number of minutes per week for various classroom activities.
Table 3 compares time spent on various class activities in Intervention group, General Education English class and 3 Special Education English classrooms.
Table 3, details first, that much
of the reading-related time gain during the intervention period comes
from what was previously non-academic instructional time. Second, in comparison to general education and other special education classes the intervention class was already reading intensive before the intervention began. In addition there was an average increase of 10 minutes per week on "reading" tasks. If the SLS activity is counted as a repeated reading activity then time on reading tasks more than doubled over the course of the intervention for the intervention group. One last interesting observation, in the control classrooms the use of captioned- video increased dramatically over the study period compared to no-use-of captioning-with-video group. While awareness of availability of tool appears to have impacted how video was used in other classrooms it is interesting to note that there is no indication in control groups of corresponding reading growth.
This study anticipated that the inclusion of SLS activities in the Special Education English classroom would result not only in increased time on reading tasks but also in increased engagement in reading tasks.
Results: Increased Engagement in Reading
Overview
( Ongoing samples -seperate web site)
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