Make Television a Literacy Tool--Use Captioning

So our kids cannot read? What are we doing about it? Not much, as far as I can see. I would like to offer up a suggestion for what it’s worth.

What is the first thing that most of our offspring do when they come home from school and over the weekend and after dinner? They watch TV! Many of them cannot read or write, but they do understand the conversations going on in the various soaps, sitcoms and cartoons, especially the cartoons. They will watch these programs and understand the conversations, but they cannot spell them or associate them to the written word.

I have a suggestion: Convert all sitcoms and, especially, the cartoons to closed-captioned conversations, thereby having the spoken word and the printed word occur simultaneously which, hopefully, will teach them to associate the spelling of the written word to the audible by seeing and associating the sound of the spoken word to the image of the printed word. It would work like the old-time flash cards, associating a figure to a sound.

It might even give a boost to the recent influx of immigrants. And as to the additional expense of closed-captioning, I believe that the number of people looking for captioning would far outweigh the added expense by capturing a larger audience.

ARTHUR F. WALTER

Laguna Hills