Using Captioned Television To Improve the Reading Proficiency of Language Minority Students

A well-known theory of second language acquisition argues that children’s communicative competence in L2 is a function of the amount of “comprehensible input” acquirers receive and understand, without formal reading instruction. To examine this hypothesis, this study analyzes whether comprehensible input in the form of captioned television might influence bilingual students’ acquisition of vocabulary and conceptual knowledge in science. The 129 bilingual seventh and eighth graders in the study were assigned to one of the following groups: 1) Captioned TV; 2) TV Viewing Alone; 3) Reading Along and Listening to Text, and 4) Textbook only (Control). Students in the three treatment groups either viewed or read three units of science segments from the 3-2-1 Contact (CTW) science series, twice a week for a period of 12 weeks. Pretest checklists vocabulary tests and prior knowledge pretests were administered prior to each unit; vocabulary measures analyzing a continuum of word knowledge of 90 target words were administered following the treatment, along with a written retelling analyzing recall of science concepts and use of target words. Results indicated that subjects in the closed-captioning group consistently outscored others in word knowledge as well as recall of science information. An analysis of word-related and video-related factors suggested that contexts that provided explicit information yielded higher vocabulary gains. Overall, this study documents the power of captioned television in the acquisition of literacy and conceptual knowledge for bilingual students. INTRODUCTION In 1980, after seven years of research and development, a technology became available which offered a bridge between isolation and the mainstream of American life for hundreds of thousands of hearingimpaired people in the United States. The system of closed-captioned television, developed through the joint efforts of the U.S. Department of Education (DOED, formerly part of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), was designed to make the wealth of television programming available to the nation’s deaf and hard-of-hearing population. The National Captioning Institute (NCI), a private, nonprofit company, was established with support from DOED and the networks in order to introduce the closed-captioned television service. In March 1980, NCI debuted the closed-captioned television service with only 16 hours per week of programming available on ABC, NBC, and PBS, with four hours specifically targeted to young people. That same year the Department of Education mandated that all public television programming funded with federal dollars be closed-captioned. This led to the captioning by NCI of Sesame Street, under a split-funding arrangement between DOED and the program’s producer, the Children’s Television Workshop. In the ensuing years, there has been a considerable expansion both in the variety of shows and number of hours available to viewers of closed-captioned television. Today, approximately 190 hours a week of closed-captioned programming are available on the commercial networks, PBS, and independent stations. Included in the captioned schedule are prime-time drama and comedy series, children’s programs, news and public affairs programs, major sports events, and special events, such as Presidential speeches and candidate debates. Deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers who have access to pay cable can enjoy another 160 hours a week of captioned television. In addition, there are over 2,000 home video titles that have been closed captioned. Commercial advertisements are captioned by the hundreds each year. Captioning As an Educational Tool Television viewing has often been described in negative terms as a passive activity. That description becomes of critical importance to educators and parents in light of recent statistics which indicate that approximately 85% of the more than 50 million children in this country watch television for several hours every day. A recent Weekly Reader poll conducted among children in grades two through six indicates that television viewing is the favorite activity of American children, while reading is their least favorite activity. Although the captioning service was created to provide deaf and hard of hearing people with accessibility to the television medium, captioned television offers a multi-sensory technology (video, audio, print) that can assist hearing children in enriching their vocabulary by viewing words in a meaningful and stimulating context. Preliminary research conducted with adult education students found that comprehension skills increased when using television with captions, even after one viewing. However, a dearth of information existed as to the potential uses of captioning with bilingual students at the upper elementary and middle school grades. Over 23 million of our nation’s children come from homes that do not speak English. Closed captioning, involving the dual coding of information through print and sound, combined with the powerful medium of television, holds great promise as an educational tool. A research project commissioned by the National Captioning Institute as part of a grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts investigated the potential uses of closed captioned television as an approach to enhancing the reading and language skills of bilingual children. Captioned Television as “Comprehensible Input”: Effects of Incidental Word Learning from Context for Language Minority Students Language acquisition has been described as a subconscious process, learned informally in the context of its functional uses (Chomsky, 1975; Halliday, 1975). Language acquirers are not usually aware of the fact that they are learning language; rather, it is acquired as children use language for communicative purposes. It has been argued that a similar subconscious process occurs when acquiring competence in a second language (Krashen, 1982; 1985). Children develop linguistically by focusing on the meaning, not on the form or grammar of the message. Thus, one theory of second language acquisition holds that individuals acquire language by understanding messages or by receiving “comprehensible input” (Krashen, 1985). Stimulated by the sheer exposure of print in and out of school, children are thought to acquire language and literacy incidentally without formal instruction, using the language they already know and cues from their environment (Krashen, 1989). Whether the amount of “input” is likely to strongly influence the acquisition of reading skills, however, is partially a function of the type of competence children bring to their second language. For example, Cummins (1979) argues that if a child’s L1 vocabulary-concept knowledge is limited, they may have great difficulty assimilating decontextualized language, and may have little insight into the fact that print is meaningful and that written language is different from speech. Thus, many of these children may be “confronted by nonsense” (Smith, 1977) in the task of reading in L2, since there is no way for them to relate the printed symbols to a known phenomena. This would suggest that there is an interaction between children’s conceptual-linguistic knowledge and what may be defined as “comprehensible input. ” In addition to these cognitive influences, the motivation to learn and to identify with members of the L2 group appears to be an important determinant in successful second language acquisition (Cummins, 1986; Trueba, 1987; 1989). Fearing failure, some children may construct an “affective filter,” or defense system which prevents them from utilizing the input they might receive for language acquisition (Krashen, 1985). In order to lower the filter, Krashen suggests that language programs must be highly motivating, nonevaluative, and involve children in ways that they temporarily seem to “forget” that they are hearing or reading another language. Considering the range of children’s conceptual-linguistic knowledge, motivation to learn and its influence on acquisition of input (Cummins, 1979), this study proposed that captioned television, as a multi-sensory, largely entertaining medium, might be an important instructional resource in learning vocabulary and concepts. Captions are English subtitles which can be seen only on television sets equipped with a special electronic TeleCaption decoder. Originally developed for the hearing impaired, marketing studies suggest that in recent years over half of the TeleCaption decoders are actually sold to the hearing population, many of whom are immigrant families (National Captioning Institute, 1989). There are several reasons to believe that captioned television might especially benefit bilingual students. First, television’s combination of pictures and sounds used to represent content such as verbal language might help children transform words into a representational form. Blosser (1988), for example, reported a positive relationship between television and reading comprehension scores for Hispanic students, albeit for those children with some English proficiency. Second, the entertaining qualities of television make it a relatively ‘easier’ medium to access than text; L1 children generally perceive themselves to be highly efficacious in processing its messages (Salomon, 1984). Anecdotal evidence (Larsen-Freedman, 1983) suggests that L2 students seem to hold similar beliefs about television which might help in minimizing fear of failure in learning. Third, when using appropriate content, viewing can be a cognitively active experience (Anderson & Collins, 1988; Neuman, 1989; in press), engaging children in making meaningful predictions of new vocabulary and content as they watch for entertainment. Rice and Woodsmall (1988), for example, using two 6-minute animated shows found that preschoolers tended to engage in rapid on-line processing of new words with insta