Kelly Arispe, an associate professor of Spanish, and Amber Hoye, resource center director for the Department of World Languages, recently delivered a one-hour presentation titled “Hot Off The Press: Proficiency-based Classroom-ready Activities” at the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages annual conference in Washington, D.C.
More than 250 language instructors attended the presentation that showcased the Boise State Pathways Open Educational Resources (OER) Language Teaching Repository, a free repository of proficiency-based and classroom-ready activities for language teachers to use in their classrooms. Activities in the repository are aligned with national and state standards, and are categorized by mode of communication and proficiency level, making the collection easy for instructors to access.
In 2019, Arispe and Hoye received an OER grant from the Office of the Provost at Boise State. The support enabled them to award grants to five local K-16 teachers to grow the pathways repository for critical need areas including intermediate proficiency levels – of particular interest to attendees.
Additionally, Arispe and Hoye shared the innovative ways language students enrolled in an interdisciplinary Vertically Integrated Project course called on their diverse areas of study and expertise to create and grow the repository.