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William, Nagy and Townsend, Dianna (2012) Words as Tools: Learning academic vocabulary as language acquisition. Reading Research Quarterly 47(1):92.https://repository.ifla.org/handle/20.500.14598/5085This paper discusses steps taken by the author who served as a volunteer librarian in WOREM theological institute to train and equip clerics/participants who were students of the institute with library, literacy and research skills to enable them impact their community and harness religious historical data. It was discovered from an earlier research on clergy information needs that there was dearth in indigenous religious history and data; more so works cited were mostly records on foreign missionary activities in Nigeria decades ago. It was therefore needful to attempt bridging this gap with related research using local communities by the student-clerics, totaling 35 in number. Most of them only attempted secondary school education and were not really proficient in spoken and written English. However, these were influential leaders and overseers of religious congregations in about twelve surrounding villages under four Local Government Areas. Their peculiarity became added advantage in generating indigenous and other primary data. The Institute’s library set up in 2009 spearheaded the literacy training effort which spanned for a year and half. Training sessions handled by the Volunteer librarian (author) were on library use skills, research methods, grammar and speech drills, writing and vocabulary tests, weekend exchange programmes, site visits to city libraries, language translation workshop, internship, seminar and other presentations, as well as computer rudiments in data storage and dissemination. Final training sessions culminated in field research using a structured interview format to generate socio – religious, historical and contemporary data. The entire exercise thereby established that in considering tools for ‘open dialogue’, the human factor becomes a vital first-hand resource..Este trabajo analiza los pasos tomados por el autor quien se desempeñó como bibliotecario voluntario en el instituto teológico WOREM capacitando a los religiosos/participantes que estudiaban en el instituto en temas relacionados con bibliotecas, alfabetización e investigación para lograr un impacto en su comunidad y aprovechar la información histórica religiosa. A partir de una investigación anterior sobre las necesidades de información de la comunidad religiosa se descubrió que faltaba historia e información religiosa nativa; más aún, las obras citadas eran en su mayoría registros de las actividades misioneras extranjeras desarrolladas en Nigeria algunas décadas atrás. Por lo tanto, era necesario salvar esta brecha a través de una investigación relacionada que utilizara a las comunidades locales por parte de los estudiantes-miembros de la comunidad religiosa, que fueron 35 en total. La mayoría de ellos sólo tuvo una educación de nivel secundario y no tenía fluidez en inglés oral y escrito. No obstante, eran líderes influyentes y supervisores de las congregaciones religiosas de doce pueblos de los alrededores pertenecientes a las Áreas de Gobiernos Locales. Su singularidad se convirtió en una ventaja adicional para generar información nativa y otra información relevante. La Biblioteca del Instituto creada en 2009 lideró el esfuerzo en materia de capacitación en alfabetización que se extendió durante un año y medio. Las sesiones de capacitación a cargo del bibliotecario voluntario (autor) eran sobre las habilidades en materia de utilización de bibliotecas, métodos de investigación, ejercicios de gramática y lenguaje oral, exámenes de escritura y vocabulario, programas de intercambio para fines de semana, visitas a bibliotecas de la ciudad, talleres de traducción, pasantías, seminarios y otras presentaciones, así como rudimentos informáticos sobre almacenamiento y difusión de datos. Las últimas sesiones de capacitación fueron de investigación de campo utilizando un formato de entrevista estructurada para generar datos socio-religiosos, históricos y contemporáneos. El ejercicio completo determinó que en la consideración de las herramientas para un “diálogo abierto”, el factor humano se convierte en un recurso vital de primera mano.esAttribution 3.0 Unportedhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/Articlehttp://2013.ifla.orgopen accessLiteracyResearchChurchNigeriaHistoryIndigenous dataUsers, literacy and reading::User training, promotion, activities, education