Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication

Exploring Culture

At the beginning and end of some units in the textbook, we learned about quite a few famous Latin Americans, information excerpts from Spanish speaking people, as well as how to perform google searches in Spanish.

When learning about the figures in recent Latin American culture, it helps identify and understand what characteristics they admire. It helped me learn about an entire culture of important people, many whom I had not previously heard of.

I also read excerpts from workers about their siesta, or lack there of. People in Latin America often to return home mid-day to spend time with their families. Because of this they work later, historically this was to prevent them working during peak hours of sunlight when it was extremely hot, but nowadays it is because they value family time. I also read from university students in Latin America. Hearing how students of other countries life their lives on and off campus was interesting.

La mayoría de la gente en Guatemala trabaja de seis y media de la mañana a ocho de la noche.
La siesta es popular y es desde el mediodía hasta las tres de la tarde.
Si, porque muchos negocios están siendo comprados por extranjeros, la gente en Guatemala no van la siesta.

Engaging in Communities

Even though in the classroom we had limited group projects and classwork, we worked in small groups to practice Spanish and teambuilding exercises. I engaged with people I otherwise would not have. This was important because in real world scenarios you would often be speaking with someone who is a stranger or at the best an acquiantance. Spanish is the second most spoken language in America and will only be growing by the day in an ever so globalized world

Interpersonal Communication

In class using the online textbook I completed activates where as a group or pair we would read a sentence or phrase and either analyze and evaluate the meaning or assign the correct conjugated ending. There was many times where the professor would engage us in 1-on-1 conversation in Spanish only, which quickly helped sentence formation as well as the ability to think in Spanish. I would find myself accidentally wanting to speak in Spanish in my next class. We also made an interview-like video for our second project. While the conjugation part was simple for me, I noticed I had difficulty with understand the meaning of a sentence. I could pick out individual words but to put them together coherently in my head I struggled. I think the best solution to this is use context clues and verbs to more quickly understand rather than fixated on each word’s literal translation.

Presentational Speaking

For our fourth project of the course, we made a video talking about places we go on campus, what we do there, and adjectives describing the location. This project is probably one of the most impactful for us because it directly corresponds to our daily lives as well as teaches us how to prepare and deliver sentences for a Spanish audience.

Interpretive Listening

With the online textbook there was probably at least one assignment per chapter that involved listening to a pre-recorded full Spanish sentence or occasionally around a minute long interview and answering true or false to things said in the audio. These activities were more difficult for me because the speaker would go very fast, probably because there was not usually an answer, just one person talking continuously. The true or false questions would be in order but it was sometimes hard for me to tell when one sentence ended and the next began. As the semester went on I began to better comprehend the structure of sentences and it became very easy.

Interpretive Reading

For interpretive reading I was given the activity of researching a topic in English and then again in Spanish and see if I could interpret the information from both and determine which was more beneficial. The one I best recall is the use of social media in South America countries. I chose Guatemala as my country of research because it is fairly close to the United States and I have many friends who are the children of Guatemalan immigrants. We shared our search results in English versus our results from a Spanish search, and while my classmates found their information was relatively similar, I found that the Spanish search gave me websites in Spanish performed by Guatemalan companies with less inconsistencies then the American google search. I also recall searching a famous Guatemalan soccer player in English vs. Spanish and finding much more relevant information with the Spanish search.

I chose Guatemala to research. When searching in English statista.com said, in a publically conducted survey, that Facebook was the most popular social network. While searching the same question in Spanish led me to a total different lists of websites, ilifebelt.com also found Facebook to be the most popular social network. The inconsistencies start when the English website says 50% of internet users use Facebook, but the Spanish website states only 41% use Facebook. They both share the data that WhatsApp is second most popular, with Instagram behind that. The Spanish website says only 64% of the population has access to the internet and only 39% use social networks. However when dividing the users of Facebook, 7.4 million by the population, 18.1 million you get 40.88%. Which is more than they claim use social media. There’s also a disparity between amount of Twitter users. The English website claims 9% of the population use Twitter, the Spanish counterpart says only .3% use Twitter. I am suprised to admit that I believe the Spanish search was more beneficial. It had more data and somewhat contextualized it. The English search had less relevant results and the websites that did have data seemed more generic versus the Spanish search had results of studies conducted by Guatemalans.

En Guatemala admiran a Carlos Ruiz, mejor futbol jugador quién es de guatemala. Él jugó más para FC Dallas y conocido como “El Pescadito”. Él es conocido por ser atletico y jugar mucho tiempo.