Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication

Exploring Culture

Practices such as social etiquette and what is normal when meeting a person helped me to understand cultural perspectives. For example, in many Spanish-speaking countries, people greet one another with a hug and kiss. Here in the united states, it would seem strange because Americans are not very physical. I have grown an appreciation for all of the cultures discussed this semester. I see beauty in uniqueness. What is important is to never judge and always be willing to learn.

Engaging in Communities

Engaging in your immediate community gives a sense of home, identity, and unity. And, engaging in the global community gives you a chance to share the experiences from your immediate one, as well as learn the identities of others.

Interpersonal Communication

Doing breakout rooms (discussion groups on Zoom) during class really helped me to stop filtering so much and just speak the language. There was not time to make sure my conjugation was perfect or that I was using the right words, but that was what I loved about those activities. Those exercises helped me to abandon perfection, use vocabulary more, and hold conversations with others.

The interview that this clip is from was my first ever Spanish-speaking interview where I could not read off of a script. That posed some challenges in itself. I no longer had a crutch. That put a lot of pressure on me, but ultimately drove me to do my best. I believe my strong suit in this assignment was pronunciation. My weakness was nervousness. I am still working to overcome the anxiety of speaking Spanish with another person. I grew from that assignment by becoming more self-reliant and confident in my speaking skills.

Presentational Speaking

I have not done much presentational speaking this semester. Telling my peers my ideas for upcoming papers and projects fall under presentational speaking. I struggle with this mode of communication due to my stage freight/anxiety. Thankfully, like previously mentioned, discussions in class have helped me to become a little more comfortable with speaking and presenting.

What challenged me in this presentation was vocabulary. I was using too many words I was not familiar with, therefore I had a harder time speaking in some parts of the video. Overall, I excelled in pronunciation and flow. I had used what I gained in class to work on stopping the filters and just saying what I needed say. Next time, I would stick to words I know through and through to give myself an easier time with speaking.

Presentational Writing

This semester, I have written two presentational compositions. One writing was describing my family, and the other was an article stating activities on campus.

Composicion-1-1

It was pretty easy to write presentational papers given our resources (textbook, Spanish Dictionary, etc.). I excelled at sentence construction, but fell short when it came to ideas for both compositions. To overcome idea shortages, I looked outside of my own experiences and became more imaginative.

Interpretive Listening

All of the listening activities were done in the textbook assignments or on tests. There were over five listening activities throughout the semester.

Unfortunately, I do not have access to the recordings to upload them here (that I know of). But, what was challenging for me was the speed at which the people in the recordings spoke. It made it difficult for me to process what the were saying. I overcame that by using context clues from the words that I could make out. What interested me about listening was how passionate everyone sounded. They sounded like they really were happy or sad about something; they had great emotion in their voice. With each activity I have been able to pick up on more and more of the conversation through context clues and tone.