Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication

Exploring Culture

I’m not quite sure what “products” have helped me gain a better understanding of cultural perspectives. The only thing I can think of is what I read about other cultures on the LingroLearning website. There would be exercises where it would show people from different South American countries and, depending on the module, they would talk about how things were in their country such as how their work days go and what their typical week looks like. As far as practices go, when I lived in California I was friends with a lot of Hispanic people and was able to witness their values and attitudes.

The exercises on the LingroLearning website helped me understand what students lives are like in other countries. I don’t think it challenged my worldview because any stereotypes or misconceptions I may have had about Hispanic culture were corrected a long time ago. I was born and raised in the Bay Area in California which has a large Hispanic population. A lot of my friends and people I worked with were Hispanic and were always inviting my family and I to get together.

Engaging in Communities

Being an active member of your community is a characteristic that everyone should think about. It does not have to be a grand gesture or something that takes care of every single person in your neighborhood. It can be something as small as helping out a neighbor with their yard work or picking up garbage that you see when you go for a walk. Kindness and consideration can be contagious. I know that when a stranger does a kind act either for me or someone in my community, it makes me feel like I can do that as well.

Two doors down from where I live is a family who has a young boy and girl living there. On occasion, when the adults have important appointments to get to, I offer to babysit them so it’s one less thing to worry about when they’re trying to get important things done. It also helps that my children are friends with theirs. And in return they offer friendship and also offer to help watch my children. If everyone treated others with kindness and without judgment, I think we would be more successful individuals.

Interpersonal Communication

Most of the activities that I completed this semester were through the LingroLearning website. For this class, it was divided into five different modules that focused on learning the basics of Spanish such as how to say numbers and to describe activities that you have to do. Through Canvas, there were assignments such as quizzes and discussion boards. We would also have conversations by making our own videos in Spanish and responding to classmates’ videos. Outside of class, I downloaded an app on my phone that has quick little games to help with the memorization of Spanish words.

The activity that really helped was the homework and the practice modules in our digital textbook, Lingrolearning. I liked that as you go through each module, it expands upon the previous one. So things that you learned in previous modules still show up in the next ones, providing more practice which I believe really helped me to try to retain what I’m learning.

Presentational Speaking

Some presentational speaking activities that occurred in this class was having conversations on FlipGrid. Depending on what we were learning in the module for the week, we would answer a question in a few sentences in Spanish and then respond to classmates. We also responded to a recorded video that our professor created which asked us questions and we would respond back with our own video answering her questions.

For presentational speaking, the most challenging part was trying to remember the vocabulary and the order that they are supposed to go in. After a few videos, before I made the next one, I just used repetition by speaking what I need to say multiple times until I felt confident.

Presentational Writing

For presentational writing, there were some writing exercises on the LingroLearning website and a little bit in the discussion boards on Canvas.

I think writing out Spanish seems easier for me than speaking because I’m able to take my time and have a visualization of what it is that I need to say. I still second guessed myself a lot when it came to conjugation and knowing if I was putting things in the correct order.

Interpretive Listening

There were multiple opportunities for listening activities on the LingroLearning website, Canvas and on the Flip video website. On LingroLearning, there were exercises where you had to choose the correct word that the audio was playing and trying to deduce if an infinitive word was used correctly. On Canvas we would have quizzes where a video would dictate phrases or words and on Flip, we would listen to other students videos in Spanish.

I really liked being able to listen to different people speak Spanish. It’s also a good exercise to listen to a recording of yourself so that you can see if you are pronouncing everything correctly. The most challenging thing in regards to listening was the first video of our professor creating a conversation video that we had to respond to. I had to listen to one or two of her questions and statements multiple times in order to understand what she was saying. What helped me was to see how she moved her mouth and to try to read her lips to understand her pronunciation of the words to figure it out.

Interpretive Reading

During the course, on the LingroLearning website, there would be short paragraphs and excerpts that we would have to read and answer questions about.

The challenging part of reading was just trying to infer what words meant that we did not go over. To overcome this, first I would read the whole paragraph and try to deduce what everything meant on my own through context clues. After that, I would go through the paragraph one more time and use my Spanish dictionary to look up the words that I didn’t know. As assignments like these kept coming through, it became easier to understand what certain words were, although I still did have to look some up in the dictionary.