Home > The Missing Piece - Subtitles on Educational Video

The Missing Piece!

Use Closed Captions or Subtitles on Educational Video to Improve Students Reading and Literacy Skills

With over 94% of teachers now regularly using video in the classroom as an effective teaching aid, there has been a dramatic increase in number of websites attempting to provide the use of educational video online. Yet virtually without exception, all those video providers have overlooked the inclusion of the single most important feature that arguably provides the most important educational benefit for students – the Subtitles, or otherwise known as Closed Captioning.

Research Proves the Power of The Missing Piece!

A significant amount of successful research carried out over the last 30 years by people like Dr.Brij Kothari, Greg McCall, Susan Homan, the late Dr. Alice Killackey and many others, has established the powerful link between the use of subtitles on video, and the potential to dramatically improve children’s reading and literacy skills.

In recent years, Dr. Alice Killackey followed up 5 years of research work by developing a reading program using 3 subtitled Hollywood movies, that once implemented, produced impressive results, including the improvement a child’s reading age by as much as one year, in as little as just six weeks.

Dr. Brij Kothari experienced similar success albeit with significantly greater numbers of children after he returned to India and used subtitled karaoke music videos to help overcome the widespread problems of poor literacy problems and under-developed reading skills.

Watch the following video of ex-President Bill Clinton recognising the value of that work and the importance of subtitles (described here as same-language subtitling) and note his comments about the Neilsen Research that indicated that the use of Subtitles on television doubled the number of functional early-age readers.

***So important is the use of subtitles – and the benefits they provide children of all ages – that we describe them officially for the first time as The Missing Piece!.

Zane Education – The First to provide the The Missing Piece!

However no company until now, has had the ability to take advantage of this research work, and combine subtitles with educational curriculum material on video, to enable students to benefit from it in either in the home or classroom.

Zane Education, with it’s ownership of the largest, and most comprehensive fully subtitled online educational video library, is now being officially recognised as the first and only online learning company to provide subtitled educational video developed specifically to accommodate the needs and requirements of the K-12 curriculum.

This, for the first time, provides students with the opportunity to study curriculum material AND improve their reading and Literacy Skills SIMULTANEOUSLY.

Visual Learning and Subtitles Benefit All Children…

The inclusion of closed captions or subtitles provides significant benefits for virtually all children – and certainly not only those in schools and those being home educated.

A wide range of Special Needs children, children learning English as a Second Language benefit greatly from Zane’s unique online Visual Learning solution.

The audio-visual nature of video - with the addition of subtitles - provides an online learning solution for the widest range of Learning Styles by providing each child with the ability to watch, read, listen to, or read each video presentation – according to their level of ability and preferred learning style. This enables the information to be processed by each child in the manner that most benefits and interests them, and provides the best learning outcome.

And The Bonus Is…

And there is an additional bonus. The repetitive actions involved in learning to read are very similar to those that help children learn and remember the material they are studying. As a result, using Zane’s subtitled video as a study tool enables the learning of one skill to help reinforce the knowledge being gained by the other, and vice versa.

Learn More about Why Subtitles are Essential for Learning…


Also, Learn and Understand More About .... 

The Benefits of Using Video in The Classroom as a Teaching Resource

The Benefits of Visual Learning in The Classoom

Using Video Subtitles to Improve Reading and Literacy Skills

What The Law Requires in Respect of Video Subtitles

Research Linking The Use of Subtitles and The Ability to Improve Reading and Literacy Skills

How Video Subtitles can Help Teaching Students Classified as ESL Learners

The First Research Published by the Department of Education (in Jan 2013) about Using Video Subtitles to Improve Reading and Literacy Skills