Over the course of three weeks, English Language Fellow Deborah Rodríguez García fought illiteracy in both South Africa and Malawi. She spent her first week in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, at the 2016 Reading Association of South Africa conference. She presented reading activities that can be done to promote vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension.
Once García returned to Malawi, she presented at the “Let Girls Learn Literacy and Learning Laboratory.” This “Lit Lab” was created by Peace Corps and Read for Life to train Peace Corps staff members, teacher trainers, and secondary teachers in methods to improve student listening, speaking, reading, writing, and critical thinking skills.
Participants came from a variety of countries, including Ghana, Uganda, Madagascar, Sierra Leone, and others, to learn how to tackle functional illiteracy in their host countries. During this two-week intensive training, García facilitated the acquisition of a variety of approaches designed to make content comprehensible for second language learners.