The use of English-captioned programmes in reading lessons

Mak Wai Chi

In a second language, the development of reading skills is often considered to be the basic foundation towards the learning of other aspects: writing, listening and speaking. This opinion is supported by the organization of the English textbooks used in Hong Kong. The English textbooks are usually divided into different units which focus on certain topics. Reading often appears to be the first activity in most units. No matter whether the organization of these books and the arrangement of the learning activities are good or not, we cannot deny that reading is a receptive skill which plays an important role: a building block in second language learning. After all, children in Hong Kong learn how to recognise the English alphabet and single English words in the first English lesson. It is common to find that students who have relatively weak reading ability often do not perform satisfactorily in the other aspects of language learning. In other words, their language development is greatly hindered by their poor reading ability. Therefore, I decided to focus on a class of Form Two students to investigate their problems in acquiring the reading skills and how far can I, as an English teacher, incorporate some theories of teaching English as a second language to facilitate my students’ learning in this area.

In the junior secondary level, it is often found that students do not have the interest to read a text if they cannot recognize or pronounce most of the words in it. In other words, their interest in reading is very much influence by their “bottom-up” reading skill, that is the ability to recognize the relationship between spoken sounds and written symbols. Building up students’ basic knowledge in phonetics, word-sound relationship, sentence structures and so on, is then a necessary element that enhances further reading development. Based on this reason, a series of lessons was designed to improve the ‘bottom-up’ reading skill of my students.

A lot of research shows that the source of early reading failure is very much related to the failure of an individual to acquire proficiency with the structured nature of spoken language. The idea is quite true as reflected by the performance of my students. Whenever I ask them to read aloud during the lesson, they usually take a long time to decide what the word is and as soon as they have figured that out, they probably have forgotten the former part of the sentence and are unable to work out the meaning. Freebody and Luke (1990) mention that to be a successful reader, an individual needs to successfully engage the technology of the written script. The two aspects of such technology are the nature of the relationship between spoken sounds and written symbols, and the content of that relationship. In fact, students have been learning their roles as code breakers through different kinds of reading activity which promote the learning of phonics, alphabetic principle or spelling skills. However, the learning of these basic skills is often carried out in the form of traditional drilling exercises which are too mechanical and make students feel bored. Therefore, I decided to do something innovative after reading an article supplied by Milton Goldman (1996) in the TESOL Journal. In the article, Goldman tries using captioned TV programme to enhance the development of reading skills of his students and the result is rather effective. I then borrowed his ideas and modified the teaching technique to suit my own teaching environment.

A Form Two class, which consists of 20 boys and 20 girls, was selected as the target group. They had an average age of 13. Their language ability was from average to below average. Most of the students considered English to be a boring and difficult subject. They seldom had the chance to use English in their daily lives. Generally, they were only exposed to English during formal lessons in school. Most students found English an obstacle that hinders them from getting a good result in other content-based subjects. As they were so young, the idea that English is essential for future studies or career prospect seemed too remote for them. Their main concern about the learning of a subject was whether the lessons were interesting and could give them a sense of achievement. As a result, I planned the lessons for this class by incorporating some interest-provoking activities into the learning process and creating successful experiences for students to see the value of their language learning.

The reason that I considered Goldman’s approach of using captioned television programme suitable for my students was that young people nowadays are losing their patience in reading black and white printed texts. They enjoy visual and audio stimulation. Instead of using an English captioned TV programme, which is still not commonly found in Hong Kong, I had thought of an alternative to replace the caption by the use of written script. I chose an exciting film called ‘Men in Black’(MIB) which was very popular among students at that time. Besides, the story of the film was made into a graded reader and the class was going to read the book as well. I hoped students would be motivated to read the book after watching a scene of the film.

Before showing the film to the class, I had selected a scene that lasted about 10 minutes and began to work on the transcription. The process of transcribing authentic spoken language for teaching purpose was really not an easy task. The guidelines for transcribing and the use of transcription in classroom as suggested by Burns (1996) helped me a lot. When the transcript was ready, I brought it together with the video to my class. In the first lesson, I pre-taught some of the vocabulary printed in bold letters to the students. Then, I briefly introduced the background of the story to them. As soon as they knew the video was ‘MIB’, they were eager to watch it. Therefore, I seized the chance and showed them the film. They really enjoyed watching the film, but they complained to me that there were no Chinese sub-titles and this stopped them from getting a complete understanding of the scene. When they asked me about the content of the film, I was very happy and presented the transcript to them. It was surprising to see that the students were so anxious to read the transcript. Their eagerness in reading the text was rarely seen in a traditional reading lesson.

In the second lesson, I showed the video to the students once again and asked them to refer to the transcript if necessary. During the second viewing, I paused the programme from time to time whenever I wanted them to do some reading aloud. Students felt interested when they were reading the vocabulary or phrases with the ‘frozen’ characters on the screen. This ‘interest-provoking’ activity was in fact out of my expectation. After viewing the video for the second time, the tape was played once more but with the sound turned off. Students were divided into groups and invited to play different roles in the film by reading out the lines of the transcript. They found that this activity was absolutely challenging, but they were willing to have a try. In order to help them to have a quick reference to the transcript, I made use of the overhead projector to put it on the board beside the television. The result was successful, students concentrated on reading the lines and tried to imitate the native-speaker-like pronunciation and intonation that I had longed for them to perform in the oral lesson.

To conclude, these two reading lessons did not only give my students a pleasurable and meaningful learning experience, but also further encouraged me to employ innovative teaching ideas in the lessons to facilitate my students’ learning. In fact, after these reading lessons, I had made use of the transcript once again in an oral lesson to analyse the structure of spoken discourse in authentic situations. The use of transcripts is indeed a very useful teaching method to help students understand the significant differences between spoken and written language. After these several lessons, I think using English programmes with English captions or written scripts can be a good activity to arouse students’ interest in reading. Although looking for English-captioned programme or producing written scripts for English programmes could be difficult, the use of English-captioned programmes can become an easy and popular activity in a reading lesson with the rapid development of audio-visual products like DVDs that offer built-in English captions. It is certain that both the teacher and the students can experience more enjoyable and meaningful reading lessons with the aid of such teaching materials.

Bibliography

Burns, A., H. Joyce and S. Gollan. 1996. I see what you mean. Sydney: NCELTR

Freebody, P. and A. Luke. 1990. ‘Literacies programs: Debates and demands in cultural context’. Prospect, Vol. 5. No. 3.

Goldman, M. 1996. ‘If You Can Read This, Thank TV’. TESOL Journal, Vol.6. No.2.

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