Instructions

Exploring Culture

I have a teammate that is from Argentina and in order to help her understand plays or anything else our coach says I speak to her in Spanish. Some words that I knew I would say to help her understand especially when our coach would speak too fast, and she couldn’t catch on fast enough. In turn she would teach me some terms and also help me with my homework.

Also, when watching YouTube videos, I would sometimes get ads that were in Spanish and often surprise myself that I understood what was going on. It would catch me off guard because I would hear it and understand but then realize it was an ad in Spanish.

Engaging in Communities

This semester, I did not do a lot of community engagement as much as I would have liked to, but I would think that talking with my teammate from Argentina and her family would be as close as I can get. Her family, still living in Argentina, would often call her to check on her and she would have me around to help explain things that she maybe didn’t know how to explain or didn’t know how to translate from English to Spanish.

Interpersonal Communication

Talk Abroad, conversation with the professor, or even discussion boards have made my Spanish stronger. Talk Abroad was definitely the hardest because I was talking with native speakers and with my classmates and professor, I may have been able to speak English for them to understand me but with the Talk Abroad they weren’t able to understand me. This made me have to really dig deep into what I learned about listening carefully.

Presentational Speaking

Talking with the professor and the Flipgrid assignments were the only presentational speaking I did this semester. I already touched on the Talk Abroad in the above section but the Flipgrid’s I will touch on here. The Flipgrid’s were a bit difficult not for my own speaking but for understanding how non-native speakers talk. Because we are used to listening to native speakers and their pronunciation of certain words, it was sometimes hard to understand what my classmates were saying and even harder to respond.

Presentational Writing

The discussion boards and one of the projects were part of the presentational writing. This portion was not too difficult except for knowing when to use past tense or present tense, indirect or direct, and preterite or imperfect. And sometimes I would miss or misplace accents however overall, this was the easiest part between oral, presentational, and writing.

Interpretive Listening

On lingrolearning there were a lot of listening activities. But those weren’t the only ones. Listening to YouTube videos (posted on canvas), Flipgrids, and the Talk Abroads all required very hard listening skills. Again, I would say Talk Abroad was the hardest because unlike the other two mentioned, I couldn’t rewind, pause or replay what the person I was talking to was saying. But overall, they all made me a better listener, in English and in Spanish.

Interpretive Reading

Mostly everything we did required reading but especially the lingrolearning assignments. The mini stories on some of the assignments were difficult to read but when I slowed down to break it down and read the words, I did understand it made understanding it easier because I could piece together the story and understand what was going on. This is what also made me learn new words because if I could understand the words around it, then I could figure out what the words meant.