Many recent studies, including research by Stanford Graduate School of Education, have highlighted the pandemic’s negative impact on elementary students’ reading fluency. One strategy to help boost children’s reading skills, that we’ve been hearing a lot about lately, is turning on closed captioning in television shows and movies.
Here at Crick, we are number one fans of the multi-sensory approach to literacy. All those layers – seeing the word, hearing it, seeing an associated picture cue – all work together to support children’s cognitive acquisition of phonics knowledge and sight words. The only problem with television subtitles is that sometimes they miss the mark (the words I am hearing and the words I am seeing don’t match, causing confusion). But don’t give up on that idea of seeing and hearing text to boost reading. It’s a feature which sits at the very heart of Clicker and is so important.
Any text in Clicker – whether that’s something that has been presented in a Clicker Book, or something children have written themselves in the Document – can be read aloud to the student by Clicker’s authentic (child voice) speech feedback. And not just that, the text is highlighted too as each word is read. So, we get that instant visual and aural reinforcement. Really simple – but hugely powerful to early or struggling readers. And especially fantastic if you are working with children new to English language. (See our New to English range available FREE on LearningGrids.)
