Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication

Exploring Culture

A practice that I have found extremely helpful when learning more about the Hispanic culture has been Competencia Cultural assignments along with the Flash Cultura videos. In these assignments, I often would watch videos discussing Hispanic culture and showing it first hand followed by answering a series of questions. Being someone who has never visited any Spanish-speaking countries, at the start of this course I felt as though I did not have much knowledge of the Hispanic culture. It was very interesting seeing how different it is from the culture of the United States. For example, I learned that Argentines often greet each other with a kiss while in America that is something we typically would not do. I feel this changed my worldwide view as I have now realized how different yet interesting other cultures are. I think when we grow up in one country our whole lives it can be easy to assume everywhere else people behave similarly which I now understand is not true.

https://m3a.vhlcentral.com/sections/1035146/activities/122563

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Engaging in Communities

Throughout the semester, I have been consistently engaging with other students in my class whether through discussion boards, interviews, or talking to each other in class. We practice our Spanish together and help one another in order to grow as Spanish speakers. I feel like I have formed a sense of community with my classmates as many of us are new to learning another language and are all very understanding and helpful. Creating and sharing our family trees with one another was one of the many assignments that have allowed me to engage more with the other students. Getting to know my classmates has truly helped in giving me the confidence to practice my Spanish with people I feel I know a little better.

In addition, engaging in the global community is something I feel is important as there is so much to enjoy and learn from different countries and cultures. With learning Spanish comes my ability to properly be able to communicate with others outside of my immediate community.

Family-Tree-1

Interpersonal Communication

One of the forms of interpersonal communication I completed this semester was a student interview with one of my classmates. In this interview, we were instructed to carry on a conversation in Spanish discussing information about ourselves, our classes, and our interests.

This is an assignment I feel was really out of my comfort zone. In past Spanish courses I took in high school, we were never challenged to fully engage in conversation with a classmate without speaking any English. Despite the knowledge I knew I had of a lot of the vocab used in this interview, I realized speaking is much different than simply writing or reading the words. The interview not only challenged me to listen to Spanish words in order to understand what my partner said but also be able to think quickly and form sentences to respond.

When going into my second interview, a one-on-one conversation with my professor, I felt more confident in my ability to speak Spanish. In contrast to my student interview, I had a general idea of what we would discuss but no idea what questions would be asked. Despite the interview being a bit more challenging, I excelled in my ability to respond properly to my professor’s questions with minimal mistakes. The past two interviews have taught me a lot about how to carry a conversation. If I were to do anything differently for the next interview it would be to not focus so much on trying to figure out what questions I will be asked. Instead, I will focus on simply doing my best to understand and answer considering real-life conversations are impossible to predict.

Presentational Speaking

Throughout the semester I have completed several homework assignments that have allowed me to practice and record myself speaking in Spanish. In the assignment below, I was required to read and listen to letters and words in Spanish followed by recording myself saying them.

This assignment helped my pronunciation as I was able to record myself and listen back to how I sounded. I often would re-record myself to ensure that I was saying each word properly. I really feel as though I did great at properly pronouncing all of the words as well as the letters in the Spanish alphabet.

Presentational Writing

An example of presentational writing that I have completed this semester has been short essays or “Composicións”. In one assignment I was required to pretend to be emailing a friend describing the members of my family.

In comparison to my first writing assignment that I did, I felt extremely confident with this one. Considering this assignment was done more than halfway through the semester, my understanding of phrasing sentences and vocab was a lot stronger. However, I still felt like I struggled a little bit with making sure to have proper endings on some of my adjectives to correspond with the gender of the noun. After making my adjustments from my draft I felt confident in my writing. I really liked being able to write about my family and I think that made writing this paper a lot easier and enjoyable for me. If I were to do anything better in the future it would be to double-check my masculine and feminine endings and make sure they are correct the first time around.

Composicion-2-1-1-PDF

Interpretive Listening

In this VHL assignment, I listened to a group of students talk and discuss their class schedules. Afterwards, I completed questions explaining what I heard in the video.

This was an assignment that I actually found very challenging. Having to listen to fluent Spanish speakers carry on a fast paced conversation with someone took a lot of focus. There were times I kept having to rewind and pay close attention in order to figure out exactly what was being said. The most challenging part overall was the speed since in class the students and I typically converse at a much slower pace. However, I really did enjoy listening to their conversation and felt like I was getting to know more information about each character even though they were speaking a foreign language that I wouldn’t have understood in the past. When I re-listened to this video now, I can already tell that my understanding of Spanish has grown as it is quite a bit easier to tell what they are saying in comparison to when I first watched this video. My takeaway is that listening and comprehending another language is a difficult task but something that definitely can get easier with practice.

Que-estudias

Interpretive Reading

Often times we were given flyers, brochures, or websites that we had to read and comprehend. Below is included a snapshot of a Spanish website providing news for Mexico City.

In order to complete the questions that paired with this website, I had to be able to fully understand what it was saying. I needed to be able to put myself in the shoes of a Mexico City citizen and read the news in order to understand what things there were available to do on the weekend. What I found the most difficult while reading this was trying to figure out what some of the words meant that we had not covered yet. Sometimes I could make assumptions based on the words that were around it, but often felt like I still needed to look a few things up online. I found it really interesting however getting to see how information like this would be written for Spanish speakers. My takeaway is that despite my lack of knowledge on some words, I still felt like I could read and understand so much more than I could at the start of the semester.

LECTURE-GGUIA