Initially introduced in the early 1970s as a means to make services available to the hard of hearing, closed captioning as it became known was standardized for Latin alphabets in the 1976 World System Teletext agreement.
In the mid-1980s Pioneer introduced a range of Laserdisc based Karaoke machines, with subtitled Music video playback combined with a Karaoke PA system,[1] the concept was subsequently adapted for the 1986 multi-format Disney Sing-Along Songs series, and later transferred to the PlayStation 2, and subsequent games consoles, and has in parallel been adapted to classroom use of synchronized captioning of musical lyrics (or any text with an Audio and/or Video source) as a Repeated Reading activity.
This idea was struck upon by Brij Kothari, who believed that SLS makes reading practice an incidental, automatic, and subconscious part of popular TV entertainment, at a low per-person cost to shore up literacy rates in India.
During the last 10 years in India, SLS has been implemented on Doordarshan's film song programmes in Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, and Punjabi.
[5] The basic SLS reading activity involves students viewing a short subtitled presentation projected on-screen, while completing a response worksheet.