Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication

Exploring Culture

There were many activities in this course that really helped me gain a ton of cultural perspectives within Spanish-speaking countries. The most helpful activities that helped me to gain an understanding of cultural perspectives were the Flash Cultural activities because I got to see live videos of their practices. For example, one thing that i learned about was how they bargain at markets.

I love the Hispanic culture and the many things they practice. I’m glad to have learned about this specific topic of bargaining clothes and food at markets because I love shopping. It is extremely cool how differently they shop than how I do in my culture. This video not only allowed me to see how their markets are set up, but I also got to listen to the language in which they use to bargain and shop. Seeing this didn’t really challenge my worldview, but made me appreciate, not just my own culture, but many other cultures as well. I can’t wait to travel all over the world and observe and participate in many different cultural activities; it really teaches you a lot about how people live their different lives around the world.

Engaging in Communities

Being engaged and involved within your community is very important. When engaging in your immediate community you get first-hand experiences as to what happens in your environment and when it comes down to improving that environment you have the opportunity to fully pitch ideas to better that area which aids in the overall growth and success of your community.

I have not yet been able to be involved in my community, but I look forward to giving back to my community in the future as I jumpstart and succeed in my career because I believe that in my community we need more people like me vouching for the mental health of those who live around me.

Interpersonal Communication

In this class, I have had to participate in two Talkabroad conversations. Talkabroad is an assignment in which the professor gives you a topic in regards to what we’ve learned in class and you have a 15-minute conversation with someone from a Spanish-speaking country. I have also participated in Blackboard discussions in which I had to answer questions from my professor and respectively respond to two of my classmates on the topic.

My first Talkabroad was a bit nerve-wracking because it was the first time I was having a conversation, completely in Spanish, with someone from a Spanish-speaking country, besides previous professors of course. The note I got back after completing that activity was that I needed to talk more. I am not fluent in Spanish, so it was hard for me to understand my partner at times, and sometimes I was just unsure of how to respond. Now I know how the process will go and I will better prepare myself for upcoming conversations by practicing being more fluent and coming up with more things to say that relate to the topic that I have to discuss.

As far as discussion board posts, I feel as if I did pretty good in them, mostly because they were all done in English, but they were also just fairly easy. Because the discussion posts were easy, I did not feel as if I needed to do anything to improve my responses, but I did learn about songs and get to research some dishes that I may be interested in trying.

Presentational Speaking

I have done many presentational speaking activities within this class, but the majority of the speaking I have done comes from doing the Voice Threads in each chapter. In the Voice Thread the professor asks up to five questions and I have to respond to them in complete sentences.

At first, doing Voice Threads was very challenging. I wasn’t very fluent with my responses and I also had to practice really listening to the questions and writing down my response, so that I could practice it before recording myself saying it. By the end of this course, I have learned how to come up with responses without writing them down first and saying them a little more confidently. There is still always room to improve, especially when learning a new language, therefore I will continue practicing being able to listen to the question one time and immediately having knowing how to respond. A way that I have learned to overcome the challenge I had at the start of doing Voice Threads was practicing listening to how things were pronounced and how to respond to them faster.

Presentational Writing

In this course, we did a few presentational writing activities. For example, I have done three compositions in which I had to write a total of ten sentences in response to the topic my professor gave me. We also completed assignments on the homework site, VHL, in which I had to type questions, answer the questions presented, or even fill in the blank to ensure I was retaining information on the specific topic.

On many of the writing activities, I did well. I did the best on the fill-in-the-blank questions and the worst on the assignments that only had four questions because I would get one wrong a couple of times which resulted in me getting a 75% which is a low grade. The most challenging part of these assignments was that there was only one attempt to do some of them and I would get one thing wrong. Sometimes it was because I wasn’t paying close enough attention to the details of the questions and sometimes I just didn’t understand. Even on assignments with multiple attempts, I would give up and just submit what I got right. What really helped me during those challenging times was to relax and pay attention to what the questions were asking. Over time the things in this class started to come together more and more and practicing on the homework really helped me improve. Also reading the textbook really helped me to understand and improve on the assignments as well.

Interpretive Listening

The listening activities in this course that we did either came from Voice Threads which I explained previously and VHL assignments, such as Cultural and the Videos that were to be completed in each chapter throughout the week.

in the first image, I had to listen to an audio and put the events in chronological order, and in the second image, I had to listen to sentences and say if they were logical or illogical statements. Both were challenging activities and took some time for me to complete. The first one was the least challenging, it just required me to listen very closely and pay attention to detail. The second one was the most difficult because I had to listen to the sentences and write them out so I could first depict what they said and determine if it made sense. Some of them I had to guess because what sounds logical in Spanish may not sound logical in English. Overall I performed on them well. I just had to pay attention. That was my biggest thing in this class, paying attention to the material. The listening activities held me the most because they improved my pronunciation and they helped me be able to understand how to say sentences correctly in Spanish.

Interpretive Reading

In this course, I had to do a lot of interpretive reading on VHL. In some of the Flash Cultural assignments, I had to read either the textbook and answer the questions that correlated or read an article and answer the questions that followed.

These were by far my favorite assignments because they helped improve my Spanish a lot. Reading these articles helped me when it came to writing things like my compositions. it helped me to see how to write paragraphs in Spanish. The interpretive reading assignments themselves were easy because all you had to do was read the article and answer the questions verbatim. The most challenging thing with these was trying to understand what the sentences meant, but most times I knew the majority of the words, so it was easy to kind of piece the sentence together as a whole. The most challenging thing with these was not going to Google Translate for answers, but actually interpreting them on my own using context clues as well as help from the book. Although I am still not perfect in reading everything in Spanish, I have improved my vocabulary with these interpretive reading assignments.