Video Use
In any scenario, be it school or not, where information is trying to be taught, videos enhance the experience greatly. Hearing a person’s voice or seeing their face creates more of a human experience and even an emotional connection. This is especially true for those with learning disabilities or those who are trying to learn the language because there are more context clues and the emotion itself helps give meaning to the words.
When I was first thinking about all this, I quickly thought of the Deaf community. Does the absence of sound take away from all of these benefits that videos give?
Absolutely not. When I thought about it more, I realized that videos with subtitles or videos with a person signing have all of the same concepts mentioned before. There’s still emotion, especially so if the person in the video is signing because languages like ASL are even more emotionally driven than spoken languages.
This is all great, except it poses a new problem. Many videos still don’t include subtitles, completely taking away this experience from those in the Deaf community. Many teachers offer transcripts of what is said in the video when subtitles aren’t available, but as previously mentioned, this just doesn’t have the same learning affect. I think it’s imperative that we utilize what we know works, and that we don’t take away this precious resource from those who cannot hear.
As a student going into the education field, I feel it’s imperative that teachers use resources like Matinée Multilingual (https://www.matinee.co.uk/) in order to be able to fully give the great resource of video to all students, including those who are Deaf, Hard of Hearing, or simply learning English.
All students should be given the same opportunities.
