During this project, we were required to write a short paragraph describing ourselves. This was very helpful to our development in this class because it taught us key words and phrases to use when talking about ourselves and other details. This unit also taught us numbers, colors and many more descriptive words that we needed to learn. The thing that struggled with the most was the use of different verbs in different context.

In this project we were to showcase our conversation skills. Unit two was all about being able to have a real conversation entirely in spanish. We also learned how to ask different kinds of questions. I struggled a lot with the memorization of the different kinds of question starters, I also had to overcome being afraid to speak in spanish in class. This unit really prepared us for later units because it gave us the foundation for longer conversational sentences that we had to use in our interviews with our professor.

Unit three was all about our academic college experience. We focused on being able to describe our class schedules, our majors and what we did at school and during the week. We also learned how to tell and explain time in spanish, and the different things that are common during those times. In this project we had to describe our class schedule and what we did during the day. This gave us a solid foundation for unit four, and it was very beneficial to learn to tell time.

In unit four we focused more of the social and personal aspects of university life. This was some of the most complicated talking that we had to do. It was really hard to remember and balance all of the different aspects. I struggle a lot of conjugation of verbs, especially when I am speaking. This unit really prepared us for unit five and the final by pushing us hard to memorize things that we hadn’t yet.

Exploring Culture

Over the course of the semester, I enjoyed more and more reading about the different cultures in Lingro. We learned about what social media was popular in each country, what was common for students and what wasn’t. It really opened my mind to just how different things are across the world.

As frustrating as it was sometimes to complete, the cultural sections of our homework were very helpful. I had no idea what a siesta was before I took this class. The sections in lingro connected what we were learning to what was happening in the outside world, and to me that validated what we were learning. It definitely challenged the view of Latin America that I had, I feel like we are not exposed to every aspect of an area ever. This helped to clear that a little.

Engaging in Communities

It is extremely important to engage in your community on campus and world wide. The only way to incite change is to get involved and encourage others to get involved. Like you see in my above projects, I really like to get involved on campus and establish relationships with other students. That is the best way to engage in my local community. the best way to engage globally is to express interest and learn about other cultures.

Interpersonal Communication

The only form of interpersonal communication that I did in this class was with myself through homework and in class. I am unaware of “TalkAbroad” or other forms of activities. The length of my practice was through Lingro Learning.

I feel cheated that I was not aware of this extra help and practice, I really struggled speaking in this class and I wish I would have been given this help. If it was not presented in class, it was very hard to engage with or find, because I would have reached to find any help that I could to practice outside of normal instruction. Next semester I will be taking full advantage of this extra practice.

Presentational Speaking

This semester almost every class we talked aloud in class in front of all students for practice. We also had small conversations in class in addition to recorded videos for projects and interviews with out professor.

I struggled speaking in class because of the quick turn around time of learning and then applying the content. The small conversations with other students were a little easier because there was much less pressure to be perfect, I did a lot better in these situations. With our online speaking and recorded videos, it was great practice that was able to be re-recorded, and also it was beneficial to be able to hear myself back for pronunciation practice. I struggled moderately in our interviews, I knew the content, I would just get really nervous.

Presentational Writing

The only presentational writing that we did was unit projects one and three as shown above. These projects were ro write about ourselves and to describe our class schedules and daily life.

I find the writing assignments much easier than the speaking assignments because I am a more effective writer than I am talker. This is standard in all my classes, I am much more confident writing. Both of these assignments went really well for me, and I felt very confident in my ability to complete them. I am sure the final will be the same way, which is also presentational writing. I can always do better by adding more descriptions and being more confident in my spanish vocabulary.

Interpretive Listening

The only outside practice and listening I did was duolingo. This was in addition to all the listening practice we did in Lingro Learning.

There was two main types of this practice that were helpful to me. One was listening to words and having to spell them, this helped a lot with pronunciation and connecting word patterns to sounds. We also practiced listening to sentences and being able to recognize not only what the person was saying, but the nature of the conversation. This was very helpful for future speaking and conversational language.

Interpretive Reading

The majority of the reading we did in this class was for the cultural sections in lingro. We read about different people from different countries and also a few famous spanish speakers.

This was very challenging for me, because a lot of the time we only understood a few words in each sentence. It was a lot of picking out words and using context to understand. I don’t think it was helpful towards my overall understanding of the content. I wish we would have been able to read more things on our level.