Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication
Exploring Culture
Learning from a native speaker of Spanish has helped me better understand the language as I’ve learned it. Learning a language is more than just learning what words mean. The meaning of a word has greater context than its definition. The time and place to use a certain word or phrase can mean more than the simple definition. My teacher taught us the meaning behind words so that we understood how to use them properly in the culture instead of just having a technical understanding of the language.
Engaging in Communities
Communication is the answer to most problems. But without understanding what someone is saying, there cannot be communication. Through learning another language, I have begun to be able to learn how others communicate, both verbally and non-verbally. Learning Spanish has allowed me to communicate with a wider group of people and gain a broader understanding of their lives.
Interpersonal Communication
Speaking in a new language is not easy at first. You are listening to the words and trying to remember what they mean while at the same time also trying to keep the sentence structure complete so that you can understand the sentence as a whole. The best way to get better at this is through practice. In our class, we talked in Spanish every single day. With this practice, I was able to quickly grasp both the sentence structure of Spanish and learn how to identify key components of the sentence so that I could respond. We constantly questioned each other in Spanish and responded in kind to grow our understanding of how to construct sentences and how to properly use our vocabulary.
Presentational Speaking
Speaking in front of others is not always enjoyable. Speaking in a language that you are still learning poses its own problems. When you stumble over words in your native language, you can quickly recover, but in a new language, it does not always come as quickly. When speaking in front of a group of people who are also learning the language, I was able to relax about my mistakes because they also had some trouble. This allowed me to more easily work through any issues I had with my speech as I delivered my presentation.
Presentational Writing
Writing in a new language has come easier for me than speaking it. When writing Spanish, I am able to slowly develop my sentences and see any errors and correct them. One such error that often occurred early in my learning of Spanish was the improper use of articles for masculine or feminine nouns. When writing, I can easily differentiate between them and put the correct article. Writing also allows the use of more complex sentence structure and vocabulary that I have learned as I have the time to think about how I am writing or responding to a prompt.
Interpretive Listening
The homework for my Spanish class included many audio clips that were used to increase my ability to listen to a native speaker and gain understanding. While most of the time, I was not able to understand what they said completely the first time I would listen to the clip, I eventually could understand at least the general meaning of what they were saying. By using words that I know and their placement in a sentence, I can grasp the concept of a sentence, if not it’s whole meaning, at first. The majority of the difficulty with listening to native speakers is the speed at which they speak. Sometimes some words sound as if they are a single word when they are actually two or three words, and that can make understanding very difficult. Listening to native speakers has been the best form of learning so far, other than practicing speaking myself.
Interpretive Reading
Reading large passages is one of the most rewarding and frustrating things about learning a new language. Learning the meaning of every single word in a language is a task that could take a lifetime to complete, and so when reading something with unfamiliar words, it can be frustrating at first when the meaning is not clear. However, the words I do know can be leveraged to gain an understanding of the passage as a whole. Similar to interpreting a native speaker, reading can be done by looking for words or sentence structure that is familiar and using that to understand the meaning of a sentence. There were many passages that were included in our homework that allowed me to practice this and gain the ability to understand it as a whole, even if there were words that I did not recognize.