Proyecto Papan: Building and evaluating a multimedia Spanish language curriculum unit based on stories from Argentina, Colombia and Mexico

This study documents the building and the evaluating of Proyecto Papran, a curriculum unit created for eighth grade students of Spanish as a foreign language. The unit centered around twenty-two stories from the oral traditions of Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico which were presented to students in five different media formats--picturebooks, audiotape, videotape, a Webpage, and a Hypermedia computer program.;Overarching themes used to analyze the creation of the curriculum unit are mirrored in the evaluation of the student portfolio products. These themes are story structure and language structure (unfamiliar vocabulary, use of past tense verbs--preterit and imperfect--and oral language features such as quoted speech and repetition). Student story retellings and original stories were analyzed.;Students across proficiency levels produced full stories with most of the elements of story structure intact. They were able to understand unfamiliar vocabulary and past tense verbs in the context of the stories and occasionally used them in their own products. Students were able to recycle some of the oral features from the stories in their own work. High proficiency students seemed to work more from a literate frame while middle and low proficiency students tended to create products that were more oral in nature. All students made effective use of visual images to enhance their original stories. Several of the students who are not normally successful in Spanish were able to tap in to their mimetic strengths and feel successful in the project.;The Proyecto Papan study looked at both the motivational potential of stories and student ability to retell and create stories in Spanish. In documenting the building of the curriculum unit in detail, this study provides teachers with a guide for the creation of story materials for their own classrooms. Rather than serving as a step-by-step instruction manual which is not fluid enough for individual teacher contexts, the study offers explanations and some rationale for the transformations involved in making stories useful for the Spanish classroom.