January- World Languages Newsletter

January 2024

Jan 09, 2024

Amber Hoye and Diana Bancroft Recognized with Staff Excellence Awards

Hoye and Bancroft received well-deserved recognition for their exceptional contributions to both the Department of World Languages and the broader campus community. Their dedication and impactful efforts were celebrated as they were honored with the 2023 Staff Excellence Awards for Professional and Classified Staff during the spring College of Arts and Sciences meeting.

International Education Week Celebrations

A team of 11 world language faculty and 7 undergraduates organized "World Languages: (A)Live Language Tables," offering conversations in ASL, Mandarin Chinese, French, German, Korean, Latin, and Spanish. Moving from the SUB Atrium to the Quad due to good weather, we engaged hundreds of passing students, distributing dialogue cards and stickers in ASL, Basque, Mandarin Chinese, French, German, Korean, Japanese, Latin, and Spanish, successfully promoting language diversity and cultural exchange.

Alpha Mu Gamma & WL Scholarship Recipients Fall 2023 Video

Support World Languages Students

Programs in the Department of World Languages concentrate on the acquisition of language and knowledge of the cultures that the language expresses. You can help us in our efforts! Donate to the Department of World Languages! (Please scroll down 2 rows for Department of World Languages. Click Give.)

Two OER Textbooks Published by the Spanish Faculty

Two of our faculty members participated in the Open Education Development Series in the summer of 2023 and received support from Dr. Sarah Saia to complete these important new works. View the original article.

Dr. Kelly Arispe authored the OER Textbook, “Spanish Conversation”. This OER will be used in the course, Spanish 301 Conversational Spanish. Dr. Arispe’s research and scholarship focus is on using new digital tools to support second language development. She is a leading scholar in the field of Computer Assisted Language Acquisition and has presented her work with OER internationally.

Spanish Conversation is designed to facilitate opportunities for Spanish students to practice meaningful interactions centered on interpretive and interpersonal communication that is critical for meaningfully engaging in the global, multilingual world, as well as successfully participating in upper-division coursework compulsory for the minor and major. The book is grounded in frequency theory and functional linguistics which prioritizes the most frequent words for practical and strategic linguistic development. Featuring podcasts, videos, infographics, advertisements, poetry, short stories, and contemporary news, Spanish Conversations provides students the opportunity to learn about a wide variety of "authentic texts" or real materials that exist for the Spanish-speaking community.

Dr. Manuel Gómez-Navarro authored the OER, Caminando. Panorama de culturas y colectivos en Latinoamérica. This OER will be used in the course, Spanish 377 Latin American Cultures. Dr. Gómez-Navarro’s research and scholarship focus is on exploring Hispanic culture within the context of the Digital Humanities framework. Further, he is the founder and creative director of 360topia, an immersive, multimedia project that promotes virtual educational and cultural learning experiences.

Caminando. Panorama de culturas y colectivos en Latinoamérica is a textbook designed especially for advanced level students of Spanish and for anyone interested in learning more about the various communities and countries of Latin America. The main focus of the book is to highlight the historically marginalized groups in the region, both in the past and today. The title of the book, “Caminando” (which translates to “Walking”,) reflects a recurring idea that is addressed in the different topics covered: that Latin America is a society in constant movement and evolution, where individuals and social groups are continuously forging their culture and society, yet they never stray far from the path of their historical roots.

Opportunities

Have you explored your scholarship options? The deadline for most scholarships is Feb 15, 2024. Check out last year's helpful news from Student Life and the Scholarship information page. Boise State offers a variety of scholarships, including for those studying in World Languages and are typically need based. Explore the possibilities that match your academic goals!

Updates

Join Our LinkedIn Group!

Join our Boise State World Languages Group on LinkedIn! The group is open to current students, alumni, faculty/staff, and campus partners.

World Languages Sponsors Prospect Elementary Multiliteracy Night

The Department of World Languages was happy to sponsor Multiliteracy Night at Prospect Elementary in Meridian, Idaho, on December 6, 2023. During the event, 2nd and 3rd graders read books and told stories in Japanese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian. Rio Sparks, a Multilingual Learner (ML) teacher at Prospect Elementary, organized the event. Jason Herbeck, Chair of World Languages and Professor of French, represented Boise State’s Department of World Languages at the event.

Amber Hoye and Kelly Arispe

Pathways Project co-directors, Hoye and Arispe, recently published an interactive pressbook titled “Find, Customize, and Share: A Second Language Teacher’s Guide to Utilizing 900+ Open Activities in Your PreK-16 Classroom.” In the book, teachers will develop the ability to find, customize, and share open educational resources (OER), empowering them to adapt activities to suit their unique classroom needs, while infusing them with real-world materials. Upon completion, teachers will have an engaging and intercultural activity and the opportunity to contribute to the Pathways Project community by sharing back.

Fátima Cornwall

Fátima Cornwall and Chis Dimmick recently wrapped up the first iteration of a Medical Interpreter Training for Refugees sponsored by the Department of Health and Welfare and the Department of World Languages at Boise State University.

The training’s goals were to prepare refugees to find more professionally and financially rewarding work in the Treasure Valley by boosting their language and interpretation skills. Those needs were addressed through eight-week sessions of interactive, tailored instruction in medical and educational interpretation. The first and last sessions were held in-person at the WLRC and the other sessions were delivered via Zoom.

The course also included Ericka DeLeon, an experienced freelance interpreter and instructor, who guided the training participants in an introduction to interpreting in education. Topics covered included U.S. laws governing educating persons with disabilities, ethics in educational interpretation, relevant vocabulary for interpreting in Admission, Revision and Dismissal (ARD) meetings, and practical application of these topics through one consecutive and one sight translation exercise.

Some of the languages represented were Dari, French, Kinyarwanda, Russian, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, and Ukrainian.

Cornwall and Dimmick are both certified medical interpreters, certified court interpreters, and members of the Idaho Supreme Court’s Language Access Committee. For more information on interpretation courses, please email fcornwal@boisestate.edu or projects@mdtranslation.com.

Beret Norman

Norman presented “The Value of Humanities in a Professionally Oriented WL Curriculum” with Dr. David Johnson, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Dr. Beret Norman, Boise State University, and Dr. Jennifer Good, Baylor University, at the 2023 ACTFL Conference in Chicago, Illinois. The session explored ways to (re)integrate an interdisciplinary, humanities-oriented content into a language curriculum that is increasingly focused on a “return on investment.” Presentations included an in-class example, a means of assessment, and pathways to postgraduate fellowships and graduate programs.

Dr. Norman’s section focused on varying assessments for critical thinking teaching practices in humanities courses–specifically those that encourage transfer between domains and also the simultaneous pathways of learning through input, processing, short term and long term outcomes. She used examples from upper level German courses, as well as upper level elective courses for the Honors College.

Kelly Arispe

Dr. Kelly Arispe also presented at the ACTFL 2023 conference. Her presentation, “Evaluating K-12 teacher development through OER-enabled Pedagogy” reported on the findings of a qualitative study in the second cycle of a Design-Based Research project. The study evaluated K-12 urban and rural teacher practices in a four-month teacher development cohort centered on OER-enabled Pedagogy using the Pathways Project, a repository of over 900 interpersonal speaking activities.

Dr. Arispe also recently published a praxis-oriented paper in the conference proceedings for ASELE which is the Association for Spanish Teaching as a Foreign Language. Her paper was presented at the ASELE 2022 conference in Verona Italy and is titled: “El desarrollo de la comunicación interpersonal oral y la competencia intercultural a través del proyecto colaborativo, digital y abierto Pathways”. The paper was edited by De Beni, M., Hourani Martin, D., & Sartor, E. in the collection of papers, titled: Comunicación, traducción pedagógica y humanidades digitales en la enseñanza del español como LE/L2/LH.

These publications followed two others that relate to the Pathways Project and National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement Grant which were published earlier in 2023 and are practitioner-oriented to help language teachers integrate OER in their teaching practices:

Arispe, K. & Hoye, A. (2023). Accessing & Integrating Openly Licensed Digital Materials for Teaching and Learning. What PreK-12 Teachers Should Know about Educational Technology in 2023: A Research-to-Practice Anthology. Edited by Richard E. Ferdig, Richard Hartshorne, Emily Baumgartner, Regina Kaplan-Rakowski, and Chrystalla Mouza. Retrieved July 31, 2023 from https://www.learntechlib.org/p/222690/
Arispe, K. & Hoye, A. (2023). Partnering Higher Education and K-12 Institutions in OER: Foundations in Supporting Teacher OER-Enabled Pedagogy. IRRODL. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v24i2.6856