Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication

Exploring Culture

It has been extremely beneficial to have spoken to different women from South American countries through Talk Abroad. Talk Abroad gave me an extremely unique insight into their lives, jobs, and families. Although the book itself is beginning to become slightly outdated, VHL gave our class different perspectives when it came to culture. We were able to discover and learn about different transportation modes, job opportunities, and culture through the Aventuras book and VHL.

These products and practices truly allowed an almost tailored approach to learning about Hispanic culture. By relating the different aspects of Hispanic culture to our own, we were able to have a deeper connection and understanding to it. As always, learning about different cultures can be challenging. There are cultural practices in other cultures that challenge our own. For example, in Hispanic culture, women seem to be given much longer maternity leave. To me, this could have been perceived in two different ways. One side of me sees how beneficial and wonderful such a long maternity leave can be. However, the other side of me thinks that perhaps women are given longer maternity leave due to the possibility of them having lower value in the workplace. I understand that every culture has their own perceptions on matters such as this. I have definitely used this as something upon which to learn and grow.

Engaging in Communities

My statement for this section remains the same year to year.

It is important to engage in your immediate community so that you develop an understanding as to how your community works and flows together. In turn, this is why it is important to engage in the global community. Communities across the world must learn to interact with one another peacefully. An understanding that every community is different must be made to allow such peace.

As I have stated before, every year our local park hosts a dairy cow show. As the show is hosted within a community park, the public is able to attend and learn about where their milk comes from. Many dairy farmers take pride in teaching the youth who attend the show about the love and care their cows receive. The milking parlor is used as a teaching center as it is open to the public for viewing. I will add that by this dairy show being hosted, the general public learns to co-exist peacefully with a community that works so hard to provide quality homes to their animals and quality products to their consumers.

Presentational Writing

Our writing this semester consisted of our in-class assignments and a letter to someone detailing our plans for helping the environment. This was a rough draft of the letter I wrote to my mother detailing my plans to help save the turtles.

When it comes to writing, I am able to take my time and think about what I want to say and how I want to say it. The only real difficulty with writing in Spanish is figuring out how I take what I want to say in English and translate it correctly to Spanish. As this is a rough draft, it is not perfect. I took what I wrote here and revised it with guidance from Professor García. I also seem to struggle with introductions and conclusions. These are extremely difficult for me to write in English. Trying to write Spanish introductions and conclusions is even harder.

Interpretive Listening

Through VHL, we listened to several different recordings and were required to then answer questions regarding the recording. It was very beneficial to allow our ears to adjust to the way Spanish is spoken by different people. Through this exercise, we had to identify words in a sentence and place them in the corresponding group.

These recordings were very difficult for me to understand. The speaker usually spoke too fast or did not enunciate to the point where I could understand. It helped if I was able to read the audio text. That way I could listen and follow along without getting left behind. It would be helpful if VHL would add a feature that allowed us to control how the rate at which the speaker spoke.

Interpretive Reading

We read several different short stories in our Aventuras book. My favorite was one about the man who predicted his house would catch fire, as it was intriguing to read. Los bomberos is one of several short stories our class was required to read.

The most challenging part of these stories is using my knowledge of Spanish to put the story together. To someone who is a non-native speaker, Spanish sentence forms always seem to be a little backwards. However, by translating the story to English and then back to Spanish, I was able to fully understand the story.

These stories all seem to have a fun fact or two or just some interesting people. With each assignment, my reading comprehension has grown stronger and has developed enough to allow me to fully understand the story.