Literacy for Malawi

After the challenges of the post-Covid era, when schools in Malawi were closed, our demonstration school project began in the middle of a compressed school year (from January to August). Thankful, from September 2022, schools returned to the normal academic year (September 2022 - July 2023). This means students started their second term in January 2023. This meant that for the children in Standard 1 (their first school year) and Standard 2, they began their third term of our specially designed interventions, and they've been thriving!

Our trio of dedicated literacy specialist teachers, whose you've generously supported, began implementing their new training, new methods learned during their Continuous Professional Development training held in December 2022. The children have been very receptive to these new methods, especially enjoying the CharChar whiteboards and 'sound boxes' used to teach them to blend and segment letter sounds and form basic English words.

Children in our programme are achieve results 8x the national average

We’ve also had a chance to look back and analyse results from the previous team, which we’re very proud to share as it shows how effective the teaching has been.

We analysed the literacy scores of the kids at the end of their Standard 1 term, when they returned to school as Standard 2 students.This has the benefit of seeing what they retained from their first exposure to CharChar supported teaching and learning. At this point, they had only experienced four months of this intervention during Standard 1 before stepping up to Standard 2.

We are very pleased with the results under the circumstances. Girls averaged 54 combined letter names and letter sounds, out of a total of 59, (25 letter names and 29 letter sounds), while boys averaged 53 (24 letter names and 29 letter sounds). 

We are delighted with this result because children are using the individual letter sounds to blend together and form words. This is a crucial step to becoming literate. Thank you for helping to make this possible! 

To put this in perspective, we looked at the data of Standard 2 students supported by our project and compared it with the national data. The national averages from the latest, pre-Covid national assessment, were a combined 8.3 letter names and sounds: 5.3 letter names and 3 letter sounds. 

Supporting the teachers of tomorrow

Andrew Mchisa, CharChar's Senior Education Officer, led weekly sessions for thirty student teachers, supported by CharChar’s volunteer professional Education Advisors. The course covered aspects of early childhood development including oral language development and the stages of early literacy acquisition such as phonemic awareness and phonics. Student teachers were introduced to play-based pedagogy in a very practical way, learning songs and games to use in their classrooms.

Feedback from the student teachers on the trial intervention at the university has been very encouraging and we are now in the early stages of designing a longer course to be made available to the new cohort of Diploma primary student teachers who will join EmUni in the new academic year.

Due to our involvement at the University, we are also planning to conduct joint research on student teachers’ knowledge, skills and attitudes around children’s acquisition of literacy. 

This is to understand their knowledge as they come into the University prior to any exposure to evidence based methodologies, as a baseline from which to compare their knowledge, skills and attitudes at the end of their teacher training when we will repeat the survey which will evidence how much they have learned specifically about literacy.