Exploring Culture

The websites and apps that I used to help me with cultural understanding are Vista Learning and Duolingo. For my Spanish 102 class, I had to do these assignments on these platforms daily, which helped me improve my Spanish tremendously.

These websites and apps helped me understand the values and attitudes in hispanic culture because of the videos I watched about peoples’ daily routines, their household and so on. These products and practices changed my worldview because they taught me that everyone lives differently especially in different cultures. The challenges that I faced was learning new words and phrases and learning that there can be different ways to say something, which adds depth to the Spanish language. It caused me to work through stereotypes because I realized that everyone has different perspectives that work best for them.

Engaging in Communities

Engaging in the global community is so important because it teaches you the importance of how others live, how others interact and so on.

One of my favorite memories of participating in a Hispanic community was when I visited Costa Rica. It was a beautiful country with beautiful people. It was fascinating being a part of their society and seeing how Costa Ricans lived their life and the resources that they used to make the country the beautiful country that it is.

Interpersonal Communication

TalkAbroad and other oral/audio assignments helped me understand Spanish more and helped me with casual conversations with other Spanish speakers. Conversational, oral and audio practice is essential when learning a language because it helps to learn the language more effectively.

In each assignment or activity, I have grown into my understanding of the Spanish language. This is. because I learned to have simple conversations and I am able to hear and understand what someone is asking me in Spanish. I have difficulty responding correctly sometimes when I hear someone ask me a question or statement in Spanish. However, I will overcome that fear by continuing to practice with oral and audio assignments. Nevertheless, I did excel in audio assignments the most because I can consistently understand what someone says to me in Spanish. Next time, I will put more time into practising responses.

Presentational Speaking

The presentational speaking that I did this semester was mainly on our exams. Students had to record our responses in Spanish, which was usually a paragraph. This was also beneficial in learning the language and figuring out how to make our technique better.

In my speech recordings, I think my technique was good, but it could’ve been better. I have issues when t comes to rolling my R’s and pronouncing certain words correctly. However, the point of the speech recordings is to listen to how you sound when speaking Spanish and how you can improve. to do better the next time.

Presentational Writing

In my spanish 102 class, the main presentational writing we would do was compositions. In addition to this, we would write reports about other people’s answers. One of my compositions in my Spanish class was a report about someones answers about their daily routine, their favorite places and so on.

Composición DOS Segunda Parte REPORTE

Soy Haley Stewart y escribo sobre Mark sobre su rutina, sus hábitos enlas comidas y sus preferencias de comida. Su rutina matutina es muy rápida.Se levanta a las siete o cuarto. Luego se afeita, se ducha y se ve a sí mismo.Necesita cuarenta y cinco minutos para estar listo. Normalmente desayunaba.Le gusta comer tostadas con mantequilla de maní y mermelada. Bebe un cafécon leche. Le gusta tomar panqueques con huevos y salchichas. Tambiéncome frutas. Bebe muchos jugos y café. También le gusta el café caliente porlas mañanas. Conduce a la universidad y va a dos clases. También estudia enla biblioteca y luego almuerza. Tendrá un sándwich de pavo y queso o unburrito de pollo con arroz y frijoles. Normalmente bebe agua o un refresco.Almuerza en restaurantes cercanos a la universidad. Su restaurante favorito esBuffalo Wild Wings. Pide alitas de pollo con zanahorias y apio de platoprincipal. Su bebida es una cerveza y no pide postre. Por lo general se toma unpequeño descanso, estudia o ve las noticias en la televisión. Usa pantalones,camisa, chaqueta y zapatos elegantes cuando va a un muy buen restaurantepara cenar. Fue al restaurante Bahama Breeze en Virginia Beach con susamigos para comer. Tenía una cerveza y comía langosta y quesadillas decamarones. El servicio fue muy bueno. No celebraron una ocasión especial.Mis amigos pidieron pollo tropical, una hamburguesa y un filete oscar. Tambiénbebieron cerveza. Fue a la tienda a comprar pan, café, leche y huevos. Sutienda favorita es Kroger. Le encanta comprar en Kroger porque tienen muchosproductos con muy buenos precios. Además, le gusta Kroger porque puedescomprar comida cocinada. No tiene tiempo para cocinar.

I have grown in the Spanish language by doing compositions because it taught me how to write big responses instead of regular conversational responses. This is also very important to learning the language because not every time a person speaks Spanish is in a conversational way. This is also beneficial to listening to what others say in Spanish and being able to write it down.

Interpretive Listening

In my Spanish class, our daily assignments were on a website called Vista Learning. On this website, there were plenty of listening activities for us to complete.

Interpreting listening was one of my strengths in this class. I had a few struggles, like not understanding what was being said. Overall, these assignments were substantially easier for me to complete because of the strength that I have to understand what others were saying in Spanish. There were also times when I had to listen to something and then click True or False if the statement was correct or not. This helped me pay attention to what the speaker was saying and interpret the language more.

Interpretive Reading

At Old Dominion University, the Language Learning Center is a center that helps with the provided language here at the university. It gives tutoring sessions and more to students who need more assistance with their language classes.

The language learning center has personally helped me to become a better Spanish speaker. The most challenging aspect of the Spanish language is responding back correctly. This center had helpers that guiding me on how to respond better in the Spanish language and overcome my difficulty with this aspect. They also gave me other resources such as articles and magazines that assisted me with my difficulties in learning the language. This was very interesting to me because it helped me become a better Spanish speaker and helped me grow more and more in the Spanish language.