Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication
Exploring Culture
The exploration of different dishes amongst the Spanish community helped me gain insight on the traditions shared within each culture. In this unit of contrasena, we learned of the different dishes individuals enjoy that they associate with family, or their home country.
This module helped me understand more about the hispanic food culture.
Within my own culture, food is a love-language and enjoying traditional meals allows me to mentally reconnect with past memories, and the culture itself. In this artifact from contrasena, Francisco speks about how a single dish can enage his community in harmony and brotherhood.
Engaging in Communities
Community is an important part of the human experience. Immigrants and those no longer in their native countries may find a sense of community, to make a large impact on how they may adjust to their new environment- especially when finding a community that reminds them of their home. One community I participate in is my close nit of college friends. Being able to share the similarities of being students is just one way we are able to empathize, and have fun with each other. The image below, is an example of the community from an article assignment from Contrasena. This image targets students to join a sports community, which creates a positive outlet that helps to emphasize just one of the many roles community plays.
Interpersonal Communication
The talk abroad assignment for this class was slightly intimidating when I first learned of the assignment. However with preparation, It came to be one of my favorite assignments this semester. Although I’m nowhere fluent with the language it was great to put what I’ve learned into practice especially with a native speaker and someone outside of the classroom.
My use of interpersonal communication has grown throughout the semester as the professor encourages more Spanish use within the classroom, with assignments, and even speaking Spanish for the majority of the duration of the class. Being able to communicate, and having to attentively listen to what is being spoken has increased my growth in this area of communication, especially so I can properly interpret the instructions and information presented. Other assignments given such as creating infographics of Spanish activities and creating videos such as the cooking video has allowed me to further grow my understanding of the language as well.
Presentational Speaking
One assignment that I dealt with presentational speaking was the assignment at the beginning of the year on La Familia. This project required me to present a brief description of my family members in spanish. This project required me to mentally keep a speech of what I was going to say in spanish,which was slightly challenging because I’ve only ever presented in English. I overcame this by reviewing my work and practicing to ensure my pronunciation was correct.
Presentational Writing
There were multiple ways that we particiated in presentational writing, one of which was an assignement in class to create an AD promoting an activity using our spanish vocabulary. I chose to create an ad advertisting Yoga classes.
This activity allowed me to use my newly developed vocabulary and create something that I was intrested in, in a different langauge. This tested my skills of sentence strucutre to ensure that the meaning, and translation flowed into something that made sense to another reader. Next time I would use more words to have a better quality ad and this would allow me to have better use with the vocabulary.
Interpretive Listening
One activity that was constant over the course of this semester that tested my use of interpretive listening was contrasena.
Contrasena was an interactive way to help me learn Spanish this semester. There were many different tasks, and assignments in the modules. During the listening activities, I would struggle a bit since there were any words on the screen, so I would have to intently listen to the audio several times to properly understand. After a while the listening portions of the assignments became easier the more familiar I got with the language. The image displays an example of this. This image depicts audio sounds that I would have to listen to in Spanish, in order to find the answer without the words to use as a tool to help me understand what is being said.
Interpretive Reading
The website where the majority of our work took place, on Contrasena is a mode of communication that measured my use of interpretive reading
Contrasena was a large portion of our assignments that used the mode of interpretive reading. There were many articles that shared knowledge of various Hispanic cultures that were fully in Spanish. When presented with the larger articles I would dissect them and have to piece together the sentences in bits until I was able to fully comprehend what was being said. I’ve grown through each assignment by taking my time and being able to understand and translate the text a lot faster than at the start of the semester.
