Interpersonal Communication

As part of our lessons in Spanish, we were required to make use of the program “Talkabroad” to help us with our communication skills during the semester. Talkabroad is a program that allows students to make web calls to students in Spanish-speaking countries and carry out conversations to train their Spanish abilities. Along with this, we would carry out brief conversations with our partners in class using the vocabulary we had learned either the previous class or the current class to reinforce what we had learned.

At the beginning of the semester, I felt my abilities as a Spanish speaker were rusty at best. They were somewhere between a kindergartener and an infant. But over the course of the semester I have learned new ways to speak, including saying that I will be doing something or to speak hypothetically to my peers. While there were some challenges and confusion between similar sounding words, with practice and repetition I was able to get a better hold on the vocabulary and grammar.

Presentational Speaking

During our class, we did a number of projects at the end of each chapter to reinforce what it was that we had learned. These projects were a simple presentation using the vocabulary and grammar of the chapter. As a class, we would present them to one another and make comments on how each of us did.

In the beginning of the semester, I did not feel confident in my abilities to present in a language I was not fluent in to a room of strangers. However, as the semester went on I became more comfortable with the people around me and my skills in Spanish likewise grew. By the end of the semester I was able to comfortably present my projects with no issue.

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