I was nervous about Spanish 102 before going into the class. I was glad to know that I was jumping back into the lessons that I was taught in 101. We were taking what we had previously learned and we are now building on the topics to strengthen our skills. More vocabulary was being added each week and how to use our new vocabulary in sentences and they are to be used. The hardest part is the conjugation of the vocabulary and how the word is bing said in its form of verbs and etc. What worked for me use the Lingro Learning example sheets and the constant practice of the lessons. I recommend doing what you can to have these handy when learning. Practice really does help!

example below:

Artifacts

This was great to get to know the Spanish culture a little better, and what a better way than food! We were able to learn about all of the popular dishes in the regions. In our discussion we talked about what are favorite was in what country. Quiero probar las Salteñas de Bolivia :). This helped us prepare our conversations with our TalkAbroad live conversations.

Instructions

Exploring Culture

In our Lingro Learning at the end of the module lessons, there is an activity about culture. We are provided with a map that we click on a country and it will provide us with a person and they are describing their culture to us. We will then do an activity on recalling what the people were talking about. Afterwards we would do research about a country of our choice and a topic to explore their culture.

Engaging in Communities

Engaging in your immediate community and global community is very valuable. You are able to grow as a person, develop understandings, and becoming helpful person in the world. By engaging you are able to build relationships that have no limits to who you can connect with regardless of any barriers that prevented you from connecting in the first place. Understanding the global social events can help with global issues in which you can provide support and helping resources to get the messages and help spread through your own community. This also helps for if you have kids like me, your job is to help teach them the importance in this and have them want to be involved in the local/global community as well.

Interpersonal Communication

Just like wherever you go in the U.S. you will come across different customs, food, accents, and other that distinguish where people are located. That would be the same with Spanish speaking countries. I had the oppertunity to speak with two people from different countries. One was from Nicaragua and we spoke about Family. The other conversation the person was from Ecuador and we spoke about food. I had a better conversation with the person from Ecuador. She was able to work with me more and I was able to follow better along with the pace of the language compared to the person from Nicaragua. I recommend that everyone give Talkabroad a try. This was a great tool to use and really dive deep in to conversation.

Below is a video clip of me going over and seeing if I understanding how to pronounce consonants and vowels in Spanish. I am happy to say that I did well and this did not take me long to do! Making videos can be tough especially with the pronunciation of new words. The pronunciation went in an alphabetical order. the key to this activity was following the guidelines which were, vowels that must be clear, short, and round and consonants: T is not “ch” , D is not “r”, Z is like “s”, H is mute if it is not preceded by “c”. The other challenge with making these types of videos is being able to control the pace at which you speak. I made sure that I took my time and that my words were pronounced clear as possible.

Presentational Speaking

In English, give a brief 2-3-line description of any presentational speaking activities you completed this semester inside or outside of class for or related to your Spanish learning. Include a recording of one of these speaking activities. (See Modes of Communication link for description and examples). 

Then, in a paragraph, write a reflection that includes each presentation you completed in which you explain what challenged you and how you grew and overcame those challenges.  What did you excel at? What/how would you do differently next time? 

Presentational Writing

The presentational communication that we did in or class were the discussions. We were provided topic in either videos, articles, stories and etc. We had to take that information and provide the others in the class our take on the situation. We would have to answer the main point of view in Spanish. The growth came from putting together the sentence in Spanish. That takes work because you want to make sure you are putting the sentence together correctly and you could be using words that you have not learned yet. I over came that by using my notes and online resources to help with sentence structure. I really want to get better at creating better/ longer sentences to things that I want to talk about.

Interpretive Listening

Interpretive listening was the hardest for me. We would have to listen to conversations about the topics that we were learning during our weekly modules. For example learning about a persons family.

The hardest part is trying to keep up with the fast pace that the language is being spoken. I have spent a lot of time re-listening to conversations over and over trying to put the sentence together on paper. I wish that I had a better way on taking in the information. I normally would say practice makes prefect but I needed a lot of practice with this part of learning. I would recommend a way that you can slow the recordings you I can fully hear each word that is being used.

Interpretive Reading

We had a lot of reading in this class. Are activities in Lingro had readings with either missing words that we filled in, identifying information, or grammatical information. This was challenging because it takes all of the teachings (except listening) and putting it to the test. This gets more challenging as you move along in the lessons, but being able to understand what is going on in the sentences becomes easier. Having your notes near helps the most, so you can refer to the new gammer or vocab being used. I can say that I have grown from this since this takes the most practice in the lessons.