Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication

Exploring Culture:

            Spanish 101 propelled me to understand Hispanic culture and indulge in the parts of it that I was not familiar with. Products and practices that helped me with this were the studying of popular social medias in Hispanic countries and the studying of the University in Mexico.

Reflection:

            The video on the UNAM in Mexico was extremely culture shocking and helped me understand Hispanic culture and lifestyle. The video explained the most popular majors, way of life on campus, and how the city is, making me feel as if I was a student attending the UNAM. These videos helped fill in the gaps and misconceptions I had about Hispanic culture and developed my understanding which in turn forwarded my progress. The studying of the different social medias in Hispanic countries helped me divulge an idea of what people like to do and how. I was able to compare their social medias to the current favorites in the U.S. and compare to help get an understanding of their trends and other things regarding social media and lifestyle trends.

Engaging in Communities:

            As a college student your community is your campus. It is extremely important to be involved in your campus, the campus is the lifeline of the University and the hub for all student activity. Engaging in and knowing the campus is extremely beneficial to students and will set them up to have a successful college experience.

Reflection:

            There are many assignments and practices that helped me engage in the community and campus this semester, these assignments helped me develop an understanding of the campus and explore parts of it. The reflection phase of the projects helped us to communicate with our peers and gain understanding of how our peers are using the information and developing their own work around the campus. The project describing my campus influenced our entire class to get out and explore our favorite places in our community and express how the influence us and why we like them. These projects interconnected our class and teacher and helped us build our own Spanish 101 community. The projects forced us to speak to groups of people and interview new people around our community which directly influenced my Spanish speaking capabilities and improved my punctuation and articulation while also learning new words from the community.  

Interpersonal Communication:

Interpersonal communication is key to pursuing a higher level of Spanish. You need to be able to communicate on a good level with your peers and classmates to achieve a higher level of understanding and communication. Talking one on one with your peers is the key to being able to communicate daily in Hispanic countries.

Reflection:

We used several different types of interpersonal communication all semester long to reinforce each other’s projects and assignments in a way that we all progressed from, we discussed schedules and arranging meeting times that would work for multiple students to help reinforce the basic communication skills that are necessary. We left comments and reviews on our peers’ work to express what we liked or didn’t like and leave any constructive criticism. The constant support and mix of ideas helped to increase my confidence in my speaking ability and progressively made me more comfortable in one-on-one conversation settings. The practice and assignments that helped the most with this was the calendar that we used to arrange times and learn each other’s schedule and communicate on what works for us.

Presentational Speaking:

            Presentational speaking was demonstrated to our class through video assignments and projects that were used to familiarize the students with speaking in Spanish in a presentational form. This was used when we described ourselves to our classmates in online blog posts. Presentational speaking was also shown in video projects that were used to help classes after us as rubrics on how to do projects that we completed already. We learned to address letters to professionals and how to go about speaking to someone of high class.

Reflection:

The projects helped to familiarize yourself with a proper way of speaking Spanish for a group that was listening rather than a single person, these assignments helped me overcome stage fright and consistently become more comfortable speaking Spanish in front of people. We learned how to address corporate and professional level groups in letter form and the proper way to conjugate verbs/nouns when speaking to people in a professional and presentational manner. This gave me a higher knowledge of Spanish that I can use for a job application or any professional manner and gave me the confidence to apply it.

Interpretive Listening:

            We did many interpretive listening activities, some include interviews with the professor, conversations online with a friend, countless listening activities online, and many in-person classes that required precise listening to be aware.

Reflection:

            We listened to many videos about different places that required listening, videos about universities and how to respond to certain questions/phrases, many conversations with friends about where to eat, what to wear, and what time who would be where. These listening exercises gave us real world situations where you would have to account for accents and other real-life examples that could hinder the conversation. This was challenging for me at first because I have never been around native speakers who talk at a fast pace but studying and learning to use phrases that explain I don’t understand or comprehend something influenced me overcoming this difficulty. This is one of the most interesting activities this semester because it helped me apply my knowledge to the real world.

Interpretive Reading:

            We covered many reading assignments as well this semester, we used different readings to learn about Hispanic cultures, people’s tendencies, and many other things. The reading that stuck with me most was a reading that involved reading about different countries and how their daily lives differ.

Reflection:

            The activity involved clicking on different countries and seeing how regular people from these countries lived their lives. This assignment helped me summarize and paraphrase Spanish into a way that I could understand. It also helped me to understand how different cultures operate daily and what makes us different. I enjoyed this assignment very much and found it very interesting and effective. The different countries gave different perspectives/hobbies that helped me be able to articulate certain words and adjectives I did not know before.