Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication
Exploring Culture
A practice that helped me gain a better understanding of cultural perspectives is an activity that My class was assigned for homework on the site lingrolearning. In the activity, we had to look up different things throughout the semester about a Spanish-speaking country. For those assignments, I chose to do research on Chile. Also, throughout the semester we were assigned discussion boards. While working on those we were assigned reading to go with the discussion board. The reading covered various different topics such as immigration, health care, and education.
While completing these assignments I found that they helped me gain perspective about how different things are handled in Spanish-speaking countries as opposed to how they are handled here in the States. For example, when covid -19 had just begun Latin American countries had figured out a way to help students continue their education from home. They did that by creating television programs for younger students so that they would still be able to learn while at home. However, they also gave their older students tablets and created support centers for the parents. As were here in the States we did some of that but as far as the parents went they were kind of on their own.
Engaging in Communities
I think that it is important to engage in your immediate and global communities because You are able to learn and experience new things that you may not have otherwise. For example, when we did our talk abroad assignments. Through that, I was able to learn about different cultures and people from Spanish-speaking countries while practicing what I learned in class.
Interpersonal Communication
TalkAbroad is a language learning activity that we were assigned to complete in class. It is a service in which we pay to have a 15 or 30-minute conversation about assigned topics with people from Spanish-speaking countries. This semester we were assigned two assignments on TalkAbroad. For the first one, we were supposed to talk about clothing and ecotourism, and for the second one, we were assigned to talk about history and art.
For me Talk Abroad was really fun because I got to learn about new things and speak to new people. For example, with my last conversation partner though I had talked to her before during our last semester this time I got to talk to her about art. Through that conversation, I learned that she likes to draw flowers and that her favorite type of art is watercolor. I also got the opportunity to show her some of the digital art that I had worked on in the past. During our conversation, I did struggle with explaining a few things and at one point she did help answer a question by telling me a word that I didn’t know but I would say that the biggest struggle that I had during that experience was probably with grammar. Also, it took me a while to answer some of the questions because I had to think about the vocabulary word for a bit. I think next time I’ll make sure to practice my grammar a little bit longer. I will say that my biggest improvement was in figuring out what questions to ask and figuring out how to ask the question in a simpler way.
Audio Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BgnudPab-q8iYmy_PeD2JCkiTQb8RWQD/view?usp=share_link
Presentational Speaking
A presentational speaking activity that I completed was my daily lessons on Duolingo. For this presentation, the app would give a sentence and I would have to repeat the same sentence In order to gain points towards the leaderboard.
The hardest part of completing the speaking portions of my lessons was probably making sure I was saying everything correctly and getting the mic to pick it up. I overcame this by listening to the sentence be repeated multiple times and making sure the app was always up to date. I think what I excelled at the most was probably the matching vocabulary category on the app.
Presentational Writing
I written presentation that I worked on this semester is a story that we had to make up for one of our assigned projects. This is labeled as Project 16. For this assignment, we had to create a text message conversation between two people and use what we learned in the module to complete this assignment. For my assignment, I chose to write a conversation between two sisters about sharing clothes.
As I completed this assignment what I noticed was that it became easier to figure out how to use conditional and future tense. Though it is not perfect I did try to get as much of that in there along with text abbreviations that we had learned during this module. Overall, I think where I excelled the most during this assignment was my use of text abbreviations. I think I excelled at those because they were easier to remember than the tenses. I think with more practice it will be easier for me to use conditional and future tense next time.
Interpretive Listening
Some interpretive listening activities that I complete this semester came from Spotify. It is a music streaming service app that has different stories, podcasts, and songs.
I created a playlist of different songs that I knew in Spanish. Some of those songs came from popular music artists such as Selena Quintanilla, Jessie Reyez, and Shakira. I also added some songs from non-Latin or Latin American artists who happen to have songs in Spanish. Some of those artists are Beyonce, Got7, and fifth harmony. The most challenging part of creating the playlist was finding artists that I was familiar with to add to the playlist. I did eventually find some but I also found a few new artists to add to the list as well. I think social media sites like TikTok were a very big help in finding more music artists to add to the playlist. I think that my biggest takeaway from this was to try new things before I only listened to a set amount of songs from certain genres. While my music taste has expanded creating this playlist has given me the opportunity to look into other genres as well.
Spotify https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5JBTNu9hmFe2Y5EXMWu2MV?si=779b3cc4680f489e
Interpretive Reading
Some interpretive reading activities that I complete this semester came from Duolingo. It is a language-learning app that has different stories, podcasts, and vocabulary games. Its purpose is to help with language learning. It offers a variety of languages including Spanish.
I would say the most challenging part of using Duolingo would be keeping up with it every day. Some days I would skip a session because I was just too exhausted. I overcame this by moving the time that I complete each session to the morning instead of in the afternoon. By participating in the vocabulary games and consistently completing each session I have been able to expand my vocabulary in Spanish. Another way that I practice what I learn on Duolingo is through its story feature. By completing the story you are able to earn points towards their weekly leaderboard system.
