Exploring Culture

What helped me gain an understanding of cultural perspectives was the culture sections in our online textbook. On there, videos were provided of people from many different Spanish-speaking cultures who talked about their lives and how they lived, spoke, acted, etc.

This helped me to understand the culture because I got to see a real person and not just read about someone. They challenged my worldviews by showing me how their lives were compared to what I know in mine.

Engaging in Communities

It’s important to engage in the community because you get a real-life feel for what goes on around you outside your typical life. You get to see and experience new things and learn from them.

Interpersonal Communication

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Presentational Speaking

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Presentational Writing

In class, we had multiple writing activities to help us learn Spanish. We would go over new units, learn new vocab, and apply them in our writing. We’d start small with broken sentences and then later expand on that to form a formal sentence. After lots of practice, I got the hang of it and could pretty easily start to write decent exerts.

Interpretive Listening

A few times this semester we had to listen to audio in Spanish and try and see if we could understand what was going on. At first, this was hard but after a while it became easy. We learned to look for key words and phrases and then form ideas on what exactly was being talked about. The audio recordings would sometimes be difficult to understand but for the most part, I got to where I could tell what the general subject was about.

Interpretive Reading

We read a few things in class. One was food recipes, which I enjoyed. We also looked at example letters and text messages as well. Mostly it was forms of writing that we may encounter in everyday life. This was helpful because it prepared us for what is normal in a person’s life.