Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication

Exploring Culture

I gained a greater understanding of Spanish culture through this course. Through the direction of educational videos on different celebrations in Spain, to the differences in schooling between Spain and the United States.

I feel that these educational videos helped me understand not only the differences between not only how the Spanish language is spoken in comparison to English, but appreciate the differences in culture and broaden my respect for different cultures. I already had prior knowledge to some of Hispanic culture, with celebrations such as Carnaval. I never had a stereotype about this, or anything in the culture. What I believed it to be, was as such, but it gave me a greater respect for the time and effort that goes into celebrating this festival.

Engaging in Communities

I believe that it is important to interact with your immediate and global community, in this case due to the course being taught online, my classmates and I were able to interact through an application specifically for the course, each submitting our own works and later on commenting on one or two posts of our classmates. I feel as though participating in these activities helped better mine and my classmates understanding of spoken Spanish, which in turn will assist us in speaking publicly in the Spanish language.

Though I have not had any experience or participation yet in a real life scenario, I believe that this course has taught me how to approach certain social situations, and understand that not everyone who learns Spanish is perfect. I say that because some people’s approach is different from others. At first I struggled, and in some way I still do, but I will continue to work towards being fluent and understood when I interact with others in the future.

Interpersonal Communication

As I mentioned earlier, we were shown videos on Spanish culture, and as a result the class was instructed to respond to certain questions and respond to classmates to create engagement among students. In a way, these assignments served as something like interpersonal communication. In assignments called “Conversations”, they worked as oral knowledge being translated through mock communications with the instructor. These worked to test our communication knowledge of a module that we learned prior to this.

Through these assignments, I feel that I was able to grow my knowledge of Spanish words, and the context the words are used in. When I first started, I found it quite difficult to playback the audio of the instructor to be able to “fill in the blanks” so to speak. I would have to replay the audio back countless times to be able to understand how to respond or plan out what I had to say. In addition, you could not look at notes or writing while recording your response, so to counter that, I was forced to not only play it back, but also remember the cues and what I written down. I expected myself to be able to speak fluent Spanish, but that is unrealistic. It takes time, but I feel with that practice, the more I listen to sentences in Spanish, the more I begin to understand.

Presentational Speaking

One of the only things that required somewhat of a presentational setting was our descriptions of our favorite people or “Mi Persona Favorita”. In this, we were instructed to think of someone who you admire and describe them with an image of them if you chose to show one.

In reflection, this was a fairly simple assignment to complete. I did not have much trouble forming sentences describing the person who I chose. The sentences flowed nicely and did not sound as though random things were put together. I don’t believe that I would do anything different, even if I was given the opportunity to redo this.

Presentational Writing

Not Applicable.

Interpretive Listening

There were a few resources of interpretive listening in the course. Some of those resources were newspapers, Spanish learning websites, or dictionaries.

I attempted to view different newspaper articles and news clips, in the Spanish language. I viewed a good amount on each of the sites given. I had a fairly difficult time to decipher and translate the sentences from Spanish to English in my head. I still have trouble with putting together what is said in the videos, but I feel with more repetition, I know it will become easier for me to understand the words, and I’ll hopefully one day be able to watch the Spanish news stations and completely understand every word and sentence being stated.

Interpretive Reading

As I stated in the previous paragraphs resources such as newspapers were viewed in regards to this section.

This was also a challenging thing for me, as I know some words, but the majority of the words that were printed was not simple to understand for me. This is Spanish 101, and I expect to have trouble. In the future I believe I will have a much simpler time with reading print in Spanish.