Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication

Exploring Culture

For me, the thing that helped me the most was watching videos. I watched various Youtube videos of people speaking in spanish and this helped me by listening to the pacing and the pronunciation of some words. I have done this in other classes as well but for spanish, it really seemed to help me. One video that was interesting to me to help learn about the different cultures was the one on soccer. This video showed me that in many ways, fans around the world are the same but there are certain things that differentiate those fans in particular. 

Engaging in Communities

It is very important to engage in my local communities. I should engage because it will help me learn about the spanish culture in my area and be able to better understand the things that they do. I work with the public a lot so being able to understand more about the spanish culture could help me engage with those members of the public better and can help me better my job. 

Interpersonal Communication

We did not use TalkAbroad but we did do interviews with the teacher and with other classmates. These interviews helped me because I was able to hear other people speak spanish. One of the hardest things for me to do is understand someone speaking spanish when they are speaking really fast but talking with other students who are on the same level as me when it comes to learning spanish, it really seemed to help me understand more.

Presentational Speaking

Like I said above, we did multiple interviews and oral assignments for this class. I studied for these interviews by practicing different questions with my fiance. She would ask me questions and I would answer them. This helped me because I was answering different questions in no particular order. This helped me practice having an actual conversation with someone.

Presentational Writing

We did one composition at the time of writing this. I really struggled in writing this. I struggled because I have a hard time string words that I know together to form something that sounds coherent. I will hopefully get better at this as time goes on but as of right now, I am really struggling with this. We also did some discussion board posts. These helped me by using all the different vocabulary and trying to form them into a sentence or two. I can do a sentence or two somewhat easily but I have problems trying to do multiple sentences and paragraphs. This is something I will just have to work on.

Interpretive Listening

Like I said above, listening to someone either speak spanish or explain spanish to me really helped. I have always been a visual learner and hearing someone speak spanish really seemed to help me. The videos in VHL really helped me visualize certain things that I was having problems with before.

Interpretive Reading

I never really looked into articles outside of the class scope. The only thing I did outside of the class was try to read spanish signs on the road. This seemed to help me study different spanish words even while I was driving down the road. This seemed to help learn new words. If I did not know a word, I would look up the word and then I would know one more word.