Exploring Culture
For me to better understand cultural perspectives, I help zoom calls with people from different Spanish-speaking regions to get their input. I think they all helped me understand and proved just how different the world is and how much more I must learn and understand.
I think those practices allowed me to experience different foods and cultural practices that I otherwise would have never experienced. They showed me how different my own culture is but also illuminated the similarities of each. I wouldn’t go as far to say that they changed my worldview, but they did add to the fact that I want to get out and explore the world before I lockdown in one spot, I already am in the process of planning trips to Spain, Puerto Rico, and Columbia, but I would like to travel to many more places.
Engaging in Communities
Community is a very big staple where I come from in south Louisiana, and I can tell just from the few conversations I had that it is as well in Spanish communities. We love to come together like one big family and cook and hang out, but we are also always there for those in our community when they need it and try to help in any way we can. Especially after hurricanes, we come together as a community to rebuild the areas that have been destroyed. It is a community effort to make sure we don’t lose the communities affected and protect them at all costs.
Interpersonal Communication
I think the combination of the TalkAbroad and the discussion boards really helped me to take learning Spanish past just the words and let it allow me to better understand the communities and the people in those communities. They helped me learn to relate to someone by using Spanish and to not just regurgitate information as we do sometimes on the homework. I am going to keep trying to speak to people fromfferent communities even when I am not in class to better understand the people that live in the world with me.The discussion boards allowed me to communicate with my classmates and help them as well as myself better understand each other and the communities we come from. It was similar to how the talk abroad allowed us to relate to people from across the world but right here in our own back yard. Communication with families that have recently come to the United States also helped me understand better why they decided to come to the country and their ambitions for why they are here. i think if i was to go through the class differently i would take more time focusing on the community rather than just the course work to better understand the world im going to be stepping into
Presentational Speaking
This semester we completed multiple projects where we had to present our families, different foods, etc. to better expand our vocabulary. While I wasn’t always the best at these, they did help me explore the research part of exploring other communities and taught me how to speak fluently to others in Spanish and not just my computer screen
The challenge for each of the presentations was pretty much the same. it all consisted of my lack of vocabulary and how I was planning on expanding this to complete the activity. At times I would literally look through the dictionary to find words that I was trying to say and then conjugate them to fit what I needed. I think I was better at the actual presentation than I was at translating and finding the right words to say. That said I think next time I would choose to practice a lot more before the final recording.
Presentational Writing
For this course, we had the opportunity to create a flyer for a medical condition as our 9th project. I chose mental depression to advocate for mental wellness in the university community.
For project nine, I made a flyer for signs and symptoms of depression that also included quick solvents and the resources students could access to aid in their low times. This allowed me to do some research into the Spanish community’s view of depression and its attributes as well as research the illness in my own community. It made researching a lot easier, but it was difficult to find websites in Spanish that I could translate on my own. To overcome this, I began to enlist the help of my teammate who is from Spain and they explained very well what each article was saying. I think next time I would put even more time into researching and developing more resources.
proyectos-9Interpretive Listening
In English,
Over the length of this course, many of the online learning activities included listening to recordings or participation in online classes with Spanish-speaking individuals with whom we could hold conversations to develop our Spanish.
In these numerous activities, we talked or heard about medical and health practices, relationships between families, daily schedules, and much more. Many of the recordings took a while to understand because they speak very quickly, this only required me to listen a few times then I was able to answer the corresponding questions. What I took away from these activities was how Spanish-speaking individuals pronounce certain words and transitions and it allowed me to alter the way I spoke.
Interpretive Reading
Many of the communication articles we read in this course were communications between two people, such as emails, texts, or letters. They allowed us to see how everyday people would use the language to communicate and how we could better understand the information if we put it in certain contexts
The activities that had us read the communications between two people usually had us also put conjugated versions of given verbs into the reading to make it make sense. This allowed us to demonstrate our skills in translating and conjugating as well as provide a challenge to properly conjugate each verb or get the question wrong. I found it most interesting how not everything is a direct translation and sometimes sounds very strange if you translate word for word. By the end of the course, I was able to translate and conjugate pretty well with a few mistakes but of course, it is going to take more time to get comfortable with the use of an entirely different language. you can find the ctivities we completed on lingro learning as they are not able to be copied and pasted onto the eportfolio.