Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication

Exploring Culture

Spanish 101F has increased my knowledge within Hispanic cultures. The video that taught us about the different holidays really opened my eyes. Then having to choose on of the holidays and surfing the internet about these holidays and realizing a lot of them share a lot of similarities to American Holidays.

These projects and research made me realize how similar a lot of cultures are at the core. Going in open minded about the Hispanic culture I came to realize that a lot their holidays are really centered around family. For example, Día de los Muertos is a holiday that is all about honoring their ancestors that have gone on to the after life. This just cemented the fact that the culture is very family oriented and it shows through their culture and customs. Overall the Hispanic culture is respectful to everyone. This can be seen when we learned about TÚ  and USTED. TÚ is used when addressing someone is a less formal way, while USTED is more formally and shows more respect.

Engaging in Communities

Learning through these assignments, especially the ones that had us look into the Hispanic culture, really helps me understand where other people that didn’t grow up like I did, see the world. It really opened my eyes about our a lot of their values are the same as ours.

Interpersonal Communication

Throughout the semester we did numerous discussion boards and flip-grid assignments. Us as students would pose questions to each others and in turn we would answer each others questions. Other assignments didn’t involve question and answer but they involved telling a story to our fellow classmates and describing aspects of our lives.

The flip-grid and Discussion board assignments were our main ways we communicated academically with our peers. We would take the concepts communicate with other students and this really helped us understand how the language and culture was suppose to be interpreted.

Presentational Speaking

We prepared many of projects that our fellow classmates would have to watch. Some of these were question and answer while others were more of a presentation.

We prepared a video describing a person that was really close to us. This helped make the assignment personal. It was easier to learn when this element of personality was brought into the project.

Presentational Writing

As talked about previously, we had a project were we had an assignment were we had to talk about someone that was close to us. We also had to do the same thing but we had to do it in word form.

This activity helped me learn how to describe people and learn the different way to describe them. It really opened my eyes to how similar english and Spanish can be in curtain areas.

Interpretive Listening

A lot of interpretive listening we did in this class was some of the mock phone calls we would listen to in Lingo Learning. Listening to two people to one another and listening to how they use curtain words and phrases.

I found these phone calls a little bit challenging because some of them were hard to interpret at times. I found myself picking out curtain parts of the conversation to try and make it easier. I think the biggest thing that would have helped me would be maybe just more time with the product.

Interpretive Reading

We would have several examples of interpretive reading within our Lingo Learning. We read several emails or letters from people. For example, we read a letter that a mother wrote to her child that had just started college.

To me I learned more from interpretive reading than the interpretive listening. I was able to see what they were trying to say and it was easier to break down the sentence. Also it helped me understand how to address different people whether it be formal or informal.