SPAN 102

Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communications

An Effective Reflection Is

Throughout being in my first full year of being in a language, I have experienced significant growth in my Spanish speaking . When I first started, my knowledge of Spanish was basically none, I basically only knew how to count and say some greetings. However, through consistent effort and trying to practice my words, I have definitely gotten better and I feel way better about it. Clearly there is so much more room for improvement but I feel that I am on a great path. If I could reflect and talk about my weaknesses and strengths I would say my weaknesses would be that I struggle with completing my sentences and with verb endings. The way that I am trying to I feel my strengths are my listening and interpreting skills, I feel I have gotten really good with understanding what I am being told or asked in class. I would also like to recognize how my cultural awareness has grown as I have spent more time in Spanish class especially since I loved my professor for this semester. I have grew very fond of the traditions and the history of Spanish-speaking countries. I have gained a deeper appreciation for the diversity of Hispanic cultures and have developed a greater understanding of their perspectives and ways of life.

Exploring Culture

This is one of the many products that helped me gain understanding the cultural perspectives from different countries. Lingrohub has so many ways to explore the culture and it has helped lots with my growth of understanding while learning new vocabulary.

These practices helped me understand values and Hispanic culture by being incorporated into my almost daily assignments and since I did have to read the whole passage I learned so much information about how Hispanic culture is one of a kind. The way they also helped tons was by showing 3 or 4 different countries and how all of their traditions were so different yet similar. The challenges that these perspectives have showed me consisted of socioeconomic disparities so like poverty, unemployment and limited education. Reading all about that stuff has changed my perspective on the Hispanic culture because I had no clue of those problems.

Engaging in Communities

This is my Spanish speaking friend Cheyenne and she is now a senior in high school in spanish immersion and she helps me when I have trouble with my assignments/projects etc. This is my example of the values of my immediate community. When you have friends that can help you when you are having trouble.

Interpersonal Communication

I would say for talk abroad I think it was a really cool assignment because we got to talk to people from actual Spanish speaking countries and we basically had a 10-15 minute conversation about family in the first one and activities and food in the second one.

This is the first talk abroad that we did, and it was about my family and I would say I did pretty well since this was my first time talking to someone that does not speak any English at all whatsoever and I did pretty good with understanding what he is asking or saying. This has for sure shown my growth when it came to interpreting Spanish. Something that was difficult for me I would say would be words that bring my sentence together and I would try to apologize and get some assistance so he could undertand what I was saying and he was really cool about it.
In this talk abroad I had fun because the person I had was very cool and understanding and if she knew that I was messing up she would help me immediately. I think my growth from the first one to this one wasn’t a huge jump but I was doing better with my sentence structure and the vocabulary. The difficult part for me was how the broad the conversation was since we did talk about multiple things but I think I did well

Presentational Speaking

This example of presentational speaking that I am going to use is from project we did where we had to cook something or explain how to cook something.

This project was probably one of our easiest projects because all we had to do was write out our directions to make a food in my case I chose a grilled cheese and then we had to explain why we chose it and honestly this project was very fun. I felt like if I had any challenges it would have been trying to remember the vocabulary for the ingredients and the way I overcame that was by studying. I think I excelled by doing my presentation.

Presentational Writing

For my presentational writing I am going to use this writing test that we did in class. We talked about a sickness and how to prevent it and ways take care of it if you already had it. I also talked about some symptoms that you can receive.

On this writing test I struggled a bit with the commands, and I did not know when to use them and the way I tried to overcome that is by studying commands and when and how to use them. I would also say that I feel like for this to be a test that we had to write from our heads I think I did pretty well. It was a bit hard trying to write what I was trying to say in my mind but all that matters is that I tried my best and worked on it the best that I could. I was not completely happy with my outcome, but I do think I still learned what I needed to learn, and I feel that I learned from my mistakes I made.

Interpretive Listening

In this picture this is an example of interpretive listening on our homework assignment website Lingro Hub. We would have to listen to the audio and then select the most logical recommendation for each one.

These types of questions are really what help me study personally since I have to hear the audio and then answer the question or match it with the recommendation that makes the most sense. So I love these types of problems. Something that was challenging for me was when we were working on the verb endings and we would hear the sentence and have to change the ending for the sentence and I was struggling a whole bunch with that. A way for me to overcome was by studying them and asking questions in class. The most interesting to me was that when you are translating sentences in Spanish to English it is basically just the same sentence backwards. My takeaway would be I like the listening aspect more than speaking it or writing it aspect. I have grown by being able to understand Spanish whenever it is being spoken to me.

Interpretive Reading

This is another example from Lingro Hub where in this case it is an example of interpretive reading. To get the question correct you have to read the whole paragraph you would highlight whatever the question is asking you to highlight. It will ask you to highlight whatever were working on in that module.

I feel like these types of questions are very helpful as well because I am getting a ton of reading practice since it is very lengthy. It is really good for practice because we would have to highlight whatever we are practicing in that module and I would have to highlight about 10 words so I got very familiar with those words. A challenge that I had was trying to figure out the words that make the sentence and sometimes the ones that start off the sentence but I attempt to overcome them by just working on my beginning words and those words inside of a sentence. I get help from Spanish speaking friends and the teacher as well. My takeaway from the reading is that I just have to practice a little more. I feel I have grown because I can read a good amount of sentences without struggling to figure out what some words say.