Last year I met Brij Kothari, the founder of PlanetRead. PlanetRead is a nonprofit that aims to get India to a 100% literacy rate through the use of Same Language Subtitling. Quite frankly, the results of their project have been astonishing. The scores in functional reading tests of people in the program were 40% higher than those in the control group. Only now that I am equipped with significantly more knowledge in linguistics I begin to wonder, how does that work in the brain? Is there something to learning that becomes enhanced once exposed to multimodal learning, especially when we have more dominion over one medium? Is there a relation with the Probabilistic Guess I talked about in my first blog post?
So my initial intuition was to think about the process step by step. I know how to speak that language, and I can perfectly understand it when it’s spoken, but I can barely understanding when it’s written. Thus, when exposed to something as Same Language Subtitling, my brain piggybacks off the knowledge in the audio and starts causing probabilistic inference with the text. As the process progresses, we find that the probabilistic inference becomes better with more exposure to data, and our Probabilistic Guess becomes exponentially more accurate. Couple this with repetition and these guesses become sealed in memory and soon our brain can identify letters and sounds and can infer spellings based on the sounds alone, much like functional literates can.
I think this is extremely cool, but I wonder if there’s more to do with it. I wonder if we can apply Multimodal Learning to learn new languages, or new disciplines. Same Language Subtitling is only one example, but there’s many others. A paper by Sankey, Birch, and Gardiner of Queensland University, titled Engaging Students through Multimodal Learning: The Journey Continues, talks about their experimental success in using computational technologies in classrooms to increase student engagement. From personal experience, I have to say that the technology on its own can never increase the mastery of the content unless it’s done extremely well. Only now do I realize that doing it extremely well can be something as simple as Same Language Subtitling. Something ubiquitous, something with very low cognitive charge, something that we repeat a lot.
So with that said, how do we provoke, exploit and capitalize from all of the opportunities that we have. Why don’t we make going to the movies a unique learning experience each time? How do we break barriers of linguistic understanding through easy, repetitive processes? What are the boundaries? Can we learn new languages through processes like these? Can we learn new disciplines? At the end of the day, the question becomes, “How do we leverage everything we already know to make new learning easy and productive?"
These questions I find extremely fascinating, and I do believe that they even may be crucial if we want to get to a point of scalable universal education.
Those stats are remarkable if true. I am a big skeptic of the benefits of tech in learning. I have seen studies that show that equipping a classroom with gadgets does nothing significant to improve education standards. I would agree with this view from anecdotal evidence of my own observing how pupils in my high school performed no better as a result of classroom tech upgrades.
ReplyDeleteWith that said, I think the problem with tech in the classroom is that it has been an undirected attempt to throw money at a problem without thinking it out- almost like hoping getting a new iPad will make you a happier person. Where tech has been specifically targeted at some specific education niche like the one you describe, I am very confident these developments can have a great effect.
I think you give an interesting and clear explanation of how people can learn to read a language that they already speak from subtitles. I wonder, however, if it is possible to learn to read a language that one has no prior familiarity with using subtitles. For example, if you are a speaker of French and every time you watch something on TV you turn on the Italian subtitles, does this teach you to read Italian? I think the answer to this question will depend on how similar the language you already know is to the language you are trying to learn via subtitle. For languages like French and Italian I think it is possible that if you know to speak one it is easier to pick out certain words, phrases, and grammatical structures in the other. However, I think this would prove more challenging across languages like English and Chinese that have such different language structures and even writing systems.
ReplyDeleteThese results are astonishing. I'd be really interested in finding out more about this program. I know when I was taking foreign language classes, my instructors often showed us movies in the foreign language, accompanied by subtitles in that language. I did not find it to be a particularly helpful learning tool, so I was especially impressed by--and, admittedly, a bit suspicious of--this statistic.
ReplyDeleteIf it is true, this could have exceptional implications for language acquisition in the future. Increasing literacy by encouraging people just to watch television with subtitles could help so many people learn to read. I also have to wonder if this could help children learn to read at a young age, and if so, whether or not children's television shows are attempting to capitalize on this.
I had never heard of the PlanetRead project before your post. However, the statistic- that functional reading tests of people in the program were 40% higher than those in the control- is incredible. That being said I don't believe the project has any hopes of impacting native language acquisition in early years of life. The project is perfect for illiterate adults and youth above a certain threshold, let's say five years of age. However, extensive developmental research has shown that an active video deficit is present in children before this age. This means that children will not be able to make the necessary connections between the language they're hearing and the objects and words they're seeing. This makes me doubtful of PlanetRead's ability to change the way we learn our native language let alone increase our ability to learn other languages solely from from watching subtitled programming in that language.
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