Out-of-School Learning: Subtitling vs. Dubbing and the Acquisition of Foreign-Language Skills

The development of English-language skills, a near necessity in today’s global economy, is heavily influenced by historical national decisions about whether to subtitle or dub TV content. While prior studies of language acquisition have focused on schools, we show the overwhelming influence of out-of-school learning. We identify the causal effect of subtitling in a difference-in-differences specification that compares English to math skills in European countries that do and do not use subtitles. We find a large positive effect of subtitling on English-language skills of over one standard deviation. The effect is robust to accounting for linguistic similarity, economic incentives to learn English, and cultural protectiveness. Consistent with oral TV transmission, the effect is larger for listening and speaking skills than for reading.