Throughout the state of Idaho, school districts are moving away from textbooks and World Language teachers are tasked with writing their own curriculum. As a result of accessible platforms such as Open Educational Resources (OER), the World Language Resource Center has begun an initiative to create interpersonal speaking activities for K-16 language instructors to remix and use as part of a large OER project called Pathways. For this research project, first, I adapted pre-existing activities used at BSU to be suitable for the K-12 classroom and aligned them to National (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages) and Idaho State Content Standards. Second, I used a think-aloud protocol with a local Spanish teacher to identify and analyze the barriers instructors might experience implementing the activities in the classroom.
My research produced a guide for current and future Pathways collaborators to mitigate those barriers. This research is important because it will inform the ongoing process of growing the Pathways database to make it even more accessible and meaningful for K-12 world language teachers to implement. I will presented a demo-activity, a synthesis of identified barriers, and the aforementioned guide at the Undergraduate Research Conference in April 2019.
