Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication

Exploring Culture

A practice that helped me understand more about the Hispanic culture is participating in Cinco de Mayo in school and also understanding Dios de los muertos. There is not much artifacts that I can use to show how much I understand the culture.

Cinco de Mayo helped me to understand why they celebrate their country and what the purpose of the holiday is. Jus like the United States celebrated July 4, which is the independence day in which the Declaration of Independence was passed by congress. Cinco de Mayo symbolizes Mexico’s freedom from the French. Dios de los Muertos is the day where families come together and mourn the losses of family members. They throw parties and create things to show how much they loved who they loss.

Engaging in Communities

I believe every culture should be appreciated and recognized. No one should be scared to show who they are and what they stand for, engaging in your global community and learning other’s cultures will open up a cultural gap that everyone needs. Society needs to accept the fact that everyone is different and come from different back grounds.

Growing up every school I went to was very diverse except for my high school. In elementary school we were taught Spanish every week. Many people would think that it was not right and that us (the kids) should have a choice on whether we wanted to learn Spanish or not, I took it as an opening to learn a new culture. I had many Hispanic friends so I would always see what it was like to grow up in a Hispanic household. The interior design is so different from American design which I found very unique.

Interpersonal Communication

TalkAbroad was a 15 minute conversation between me and someone from a Hispanic country. Discussion Boards were to be typed in Spanish and we answered questions based on our own views. I believe I have used all three types of mode of communications in this course.

I loved having the TalkAbroad conversations because it give me the opportunity to interact with someone who is fluent in the culture I am learning. TalkAbroad encouraged me to want to learn more about the Hispanic culture and have the goal of one day being fluent in the language. Discussion board helped me to convert my thoughts from my native language to a language I am learning. I excel at listening to Spanish speakers, I am slowly getting better at translating and understanding how to make sentences.

Presentational Speaking

I have completed several zoom meetings with my professor and also completed conversations with classmates to enhance my vocal presentation. Many of the assignments were not easy for me, mainly because I am not strongly fluent in speaking Spanish yet.

The conversations challenged me the most because I had to go off memory and speak in Spanish which is not my native language. I tried to understand what to say by studying the material and new vocab I learned from that unit to guide me on making the conversation as natural as possible. I also had to do voice memos on Contrseña, depending on the unit which helped me to form better sentences and helped me to pronounce the words as well.

Presentational Writing

I created several discussions board demonstrating my ability to write in Spanish. Also with all the project I have had to do, I had to type paragraphs describing what it is that I am talking about and /or doing.

The discussion boards were the easiest thing for me to do in this class because they were my opinionated pieces and everything that I wanted to say in them I could translate perfectly fine. The projects were a little harder because I had to form longer sentences and describe the material that I was learning.

Proyecto-15

Interpretive Listening

The interpretive listening part of this course came from me watching the learning videos, the video for the quizzes, performing the conversations with my classmates, and attending the quarterly meetings with my teacher.

I listened to videos that helped me conjugate verbs in the future, past and conditional tense. I also listened to my classmates red their parts to our conversations. I heard my teacher ask me questions about my life and if I understood everything that was going on in the class at the moment. I hear different languages on an everyday basis and I never realize that it helps me to understand Spanish more.

Interpretive Reading

I have completed numerous amounts of things in this course to demonstrate my reading capability. The Contresena website that we learned everything on is in all Spanish. The instructions for my projects and TalkAborads were in Spanish as well.

Out of everything in this class the TalkAbroads were the most challenging for me because I had to try very hard to understand who I was talking to on the first try. Knowing that English was not their first language, I did not want them to keep repeating themselves and that wouldn’t have helped me at all. However I also found the TalkAbroads the most interesting because I got to see a glimpse of a whole different culture and it was a very nice experience.