Exploring Culture

My favorite cultural reading that we did was in class and the article talked about how schooling was in Spain and Latin America. Latin America had a lot of differences than the USA and I think this helped my view a bit better.

Growing up in the US is very different from growing up in another country. Everything is made out to be a lot better in the US while everywhere seems and feels worse than in the US. Reading about the school life in highschool and college/university in Spain and Latin America changed my view. The reading made the US system seem a bit weaker and here my explanation. In highschool in Latin america and Spain, students are exposed to many career paths while in the US you are taught the same thing almost every year. In Spanish speaking countries the tuition is very low and most students have a major while in the US college is very expensive and most college students switch their majors a few times before they get their bachelor. I think the US should do more to have students be more involved in finding a career that they want to get into rather than just waiting for college and having to switch majors.

Engaging in Communities

In English, give a brief description of the value of, and importance of, engaging in your immediate community and the global community.

Reflect on your experience and participation in these communities. Include artifacts such as photos, audio/video clips, etc.

Interpersonal Communication

One of the activities that we did was the oral conversation between students. I had a conversation between another student and I feel I did bad even though my grade okay.

After I submitted the assignment I felt that I did really badly. I stuttered a lot when I was asked questions by my partner and I felt that I had even froze when asking or answering question. I also messed up a lot on the grammar as in the I put words out of order when speaking the questions. I definitely needed to practice more because the grammar really was my weakest part on it. I also need to practice conversations more so I don’t stutter as much like I did.

Presentational Writing

My writing in this class overall was really well especially for when I had to write about my family.

One of the things that I did improve on in my composition on my family was grammar. Grammar has always been very difficult for me to do even in English and I was able to improve and get a 90 on my last composition in class. I know I can definitely get better at the grammar because grammar is still very hard for me.

Interpretive Listening

We did many listening activities throughout the course on each chapter and for homework assignments.

On vhl the most difficult thing for me was listening to the audios and then answering the questions. I think the issue was that they spoke very fast and I had problems catching what they said, and then translating it over to answering the questions. The only thing I could do to improve was listen to the audio over and over again until I understood what I had read. It was super difficult and this ties in with my oral speaking skills because I am slow when trying to respond trying to catch what another person is difficult.

Interpretive Reading

Reading overall has never been the really hard for me when it came to reading Spanish. In class our teacher would ask us/ show us questions that we needed to respond to and I was usually able to read the assignments. Reading compared to writing and speaking is definitely harder.