Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication

Exploring Culture

Over the summer, I took a trip to Purto Rico to visit my wife’s family. With what I learned in Spanish 101, I was able to communicate basic sentences and greetings. Being emersed in Spanish culture allowed me fully engage myself in trying to speak Spanish. Purto Ricans use a lot of spanglish when they speak, so it was easy to follow along in conversations. The hardest part of my trip was trying to understand the slang. Someone would name something in the way they normally would, and i would be confused because of the way i was taught. Overall I had an amazing experience and would travel back to test my abilities even further.

Interpersonal Communication

Over the course of the semester, we completed two conversations using TalkAbroad. They were both 15 minutes long but it felt like they went by quicker. I was nervous at the start of both conversations, but as time went on i relaxed and was able to find my words. The conversations went fluidly and the instructor was extremally patient and helped me find the words i needed. I found the experience to be overall excellent and wouldn’t have a problem if another conversation was scheduled.

Presentational Speaking

Our first project this semester was to introduce our family to the class. We used our phones to provide a picture of our family members along with a brief description of them. We use our vocabulary to give a basic physical description of them (such as age, physical characteristics, and personality traits) and described something they enjoy doing.

Presentational Writing

This semester we were tasked with creating a flyer or poster promoting an activity for people to join. This was apart of Unidad 7 “¿Cómo mantiene la buena salud?”, or how do you maintain good health. The project’s goal was for us to describe an activity and it’s benefit to your health. We had to use informal commands and vocabulary from the unit to compel someone to join. I chose to create a basketball tournament for ODU students to join and test their athletic abilities (or just too come and cheer on classmates). This project was my favorite as i enjoyed being able to express my creative side while challenging my critical thinking abilities in Spanish.

Interpretive Listening

I loved taking Spanish this semester because of the fact that it is an ‘in person’ class. The class is centered around us practicing our speaking ability along with being able to listen and comprehend our partners response. We have to actively listen to the profesora’s instructions (as she only speaks to us in Spanish) to try and comprehend what she instructed us to do. For the most part it was easy to comprehend but if we did have a question, she would try to restate the question (using as many cognates as possible) until we understood what she asked.

As an example, some activates required us to listen to a sentence and determine the proper form used to conjugate the verb. These presented the challenge of visualizing the word and the from that was used. Nosotros is the easiest to recognize because the words always end in “imos”.

Interpretive Reading

Throughout the semester, we were tasked with reading a passage and selecting examples of words from that lesson. For example, in the image below we were tasked with selecting 12 verbs in the preterite form that describe completed past events. I found these problems to be the most difficult as they would challenge you to conjugate words that were not previously mentioned in the chapter but still follow the same rules. In the example below, they selected “empezo” and “se graduo”, which are both past tense verbs but weren’t mentioned as a example in the “preparar”. Over all, my comprehension of Spanish in the written form is better than my comprehension of the verbal form, but i still found some activities to be challenging.