SAME LANGUAGE SUBTITLING (SLS) OF BOLLYWOOD FILM SONGS ON TV: EFFECTS ON LITERACY

In addition to 273 million illiterates (2001 Census), India has an estimated 389 million officially “literate” people who cannot read a simple text (functional illiterates). Same Language Subtitling (SLS), the concept of subtitling audio-visual content in the ‘same’ language as the audio, has been promoted as a low-cost solution on existing film songs on TV that 740 million viewers already watch with some passion in their leisure time. Does this SLS exposure in leisure time TV consumption lead to reading skill improvement among functional illiterates?

SLS was implemented for five years on Rangoli, a nationally telecast, popular weekly TV program of Bollywood film songs in Hindi. Data were collected independently at the baseline (2002) and endline (2007) on a number of reading, writing and self-perception of literacy skill indicators, from a random sample drawn from five Hindi speaking states (N = 7409). Self-reported regular Rangoli viewers (treatment or SLS-group) were compared to those who saw it rarely or never (control or no-SLS group).

For children in school, the SLS-group showed substantially greater mean improvement on all the indicators of literacy skill than the no-SLS group. The findings were in a similar direction for youth and adults (15+) – the mean improvements in the SLS-group were greater than mean improvements in the no-SLS group. However, the effects of SLS on youth and adults were smaller than those observed for school children. Regression analyses confirmed the significant effect of SLS, for both school children and adults.