Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication

Exploring Culture

• Some products that have given me some understanding of different cultures are what people from different parts of Spanish-speaking countries cook with including some ingredients. Places like Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba cook with ingredients like Sazón, Sofrito (a combination of many greens and spices), and even Bay leaves which are all typical Caribbean spices. Mexico on the other hand uses spices like cumin, cocao powder, and tajín which are mainly found in traditional Mexican dishes.

• This gave me a better understanding of all the types of spices they pull from when it comes to cooking their traditional foods. I’m Puerto Rican so it allows me to better understand why my grandparents cook with these spices to give a certain flavor they’re trying to achieve for me and my family. These products I tried to imagine being cooked with different cuts of meat and they are mainly found being used with pork which is a traditional food Puerto Ricans cook with many meals, typically as the main protein of the meal. It’s also very interesting for he spices used by Mexican culture because you can mainly find these seasonings in Mexican culture with how they cook different meals including carne asada, birria meat, and even chilaquiles. Well, many people assume when you say Spanish foods they instantly refer to Mexican food but this is a misconception due to how many different types of Spanish food there are out there along with its own taste, including dishes like, Paella, Pastelijos, pasteles, pollo guisado, etc.

Engaging in Communities

• I believe engaging in your personal community can really give you a different understanding of the types of Spanish being spoken in different parts of the state, country, or even the world. My personal experience with this has to do with speaking to my family on my father’s side who are all Puerto Rican, they use different words or different ways to explain things or even express their feelings about an experience or something that has happened. This is very obvious when around Puerto Ricans but I also learned about it during my time in the coursework for SPAN 202 in our module about Nuyorricans. When a Puerto Rican wants to express excitement or joy a lot of times they say the phrase “wepa” which is an almost translation for “yay”. I’ve also had the pleasure of living with a Peruvian friend who lives on the West Coast where he speaks Spanish but more commonly the dialect that is spoken in Peru which can have different variations for words used in Spanish. It has also shown me different ways Spanish is spoken on the west coast compared to the east coast, and lastly, I had the chance to travel abroad to Barcelona and the way Spanish is spoken there is also very different from the state’s dialect.

Interpersonal Communication

• During summer 2023 I engaged in a TalkAbroad discussion between myself and another individual by the name of Matias Ducombs. We first talked about influencers and who were our favorite and what they meant to us in terms of why we follow them, then engaged in a conversation about different customs that we follow along with including or not family, and what they were and what we do. I also completed different discussion boards throughout the semester which would allow us to express our opinions on different topics in the class and how we would respond to different questions broading our view on what we were supposed to write about. This mode of communication would be best described as Interpersonal due to the fact that it was two-way communication between myself and another person by speaking and listening.

• For these assignments, the class was given topics that we could expand on but these topics were to be some of what we were talking about. For the TalkAbroad it was mainly talking to another person in a Spanish-speaking country who speaks fluent Spanish and getting to know who they were and also what their responses to the questions associated with the assignment were. The TalkAbroad and also the Discussion board were only slightly difficult due to the fact that I typically can understand what someone is asking me in Spanish or what they’re even saying but a lot of times I struggle with putting together sentences in Spanish and speaking them out. I feel I definitely excelled at understanding what was being asked or what the topic of discussion was and what questions went along with that. During the conversation and also typing a discussion board I learned that having a better sense of verbs and different words in Spanish to describe something I can create a sentence that still will make sense when speaking or writing it down for others. I also think being able to think in Spanish really helped me because I definitely improved my critical thinking by being able to think about what was being asked along with what I wanted to say in Spanish.

Presentational Speaking

• Did not present anything.

Presentational Writing

• Did not present anything.

Interpretive Listening

• For my interpretive listening activities, I would say the most frequent activity was via the website Lingrolearning where we were assignment in different homework assignments to listen to audio at times and be able to pick out certain words that didn’t belong or be able to differentiate whether a question being asked related to the audio was true, false, or not mentioned at all in the audio.

• I’m unable to record a voice memo of the audio provided on the Lingrolearning website but I can describe was was being asked of us. There were times when we were given audio on a Spanish country and it was stating ideas bout a festival or celebration that is held in that country, then below the audio we would have questions that would be asked about the festival being held like, whether the festival was during the day or night, if it was a multiple day festival or just a one time thing, etc. The most challenging thing was listening and making sure I heard everything being said in the voice memo a lot of times when you hear audio versus in person you can understand what someone is saying. I overcame this by listening to the voice memos multiple times until I fully understood what I was hearing when I finally put together all the words being said. The takeaway for these assignments is that many of the recordings aren’t going to necessarily give you a very dictated sound of the words coming from the narrator but I just have to keep my ears open and try to understand what they’re saying even if I can’t ask questions. I do feel like this has allowed me to develop a different hearing for Spanish than I would for English words so I think now I hear pronounciations that I wouldn’t hear before these types of exercises.

Interpretive Reading

• For interpretive reading, there were paragraphs that would explain at times different things going on in our modules for Lingrolearning. The photo included below is about a Chef who cooks in Peru and is very famous, these exercises allowed us to look more into how sentence structure can be worded by text and what different ways someone can be referred to in a long description.

• These paragraphs weren’t necessarily challenging but they only gave me trouble when I saw words that I was used to and had to really think about the context and how they’re being used. I overcame these challenging words by reading more into the sentence to see the context in which they were talking and also whether or not it was a verb or noun. I found the most interesting thing was at times some descriptions would give us questions that don’t relate whatsoever to the text and we would have to differentiate that while reading, I also enjoyed reading about different cultures. My takeaway from the reading was to understand different cultures and also see how formal Spanish is written compared to how it’s spoken by others, this gave me a better idea on how to describe someone that I would otherwise know of but wanted to give a professional description of them.