Exploring Culture

During the semester, exploring the culture of Spanish speaking countries was a really fun part of the course. I explored the varying culture through modules in the workbook and videos provided during class. I found Fiestas of Spain to be an excellent module to show the differences in how we celebrate important dates.

My experience grew in understanding of the celebrations, but throughout the video, you see all the colors, how people interact with each other, and what they were wearing and what they were eating. I also liked engaging with my classmates on what festival they found interesting.

Engaging in Communities

It is important to engage in your immediate community as well as global community. Being part of a community can gain a larger understanding of a community’s needs and aspirations and seeing diverse perspectives can empower strong decision making. Additionally, being part of community engagement increases transparency and provides a sense of ownership. During this semester, I felt like a community that was on the same journey to learn more about Latin American countries. An interesting module would be discussing a normal day in another country. I choose Guatemala and found it quite interesting. While I did not write about Jarol and his day, I found his video to be engaging and made me see what the experiences of a child from Guatemala is facing.

Interpersonal Communication

During the course, I was able to complete multiple experiences with my professor and classmates to complete interpersonal communications. Additionally, my wife would help me with learning the words by asking me the English term with the my replies being in Spanish. My vocabulary and sentence structure grew with each new module as the words learned would help to provide longer duration speaking opportunities. Additionally, I used workouts from Peloton with the Spanish speaking instructors. Each class I was able to understand more of what was instructed.

Presentational Speaking

Public speaking was the most challenging portion of the course. Each week I felt more comfortable about it, but it felt strange. Towards the end of the semester, I was beginning to think of some common items around the house by their Spanish titles which made me feel as if I was stating to get some comfort with the language. For the first few presentations I felt very weird speaking and found myself speaking faster to get it over with. Towards the end of the course, I felt more comfortable and was really happy with the limited ability to have a conversation with the professor.

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Presentational Writing

Over the course of the class I had writing assignments that would help build a foundation of Spanish. In project one, I had to complete a biography I would put online for a social media platform. While I understood the assignment, I don’t have any social media and found it challenging to feel authentic. The second one felt like I needed improvement with my annunciation. The fifth assignment was by far my favorite. Writing a recommendation for someone I admire was a really good way to complete the final assignment.

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Interpretive Listening

I was able to actively listen throughout the semester by listening to my classmates and my professor. I certainly found this to be really difficult and sometimes had a hard time processing what was being completely said without some hand gestures. I would also listen to tv shows in Spanish to try and pick more words outside of class. My most challenging listening module was with my professor at the end of the semester. Trying to have a conversation with someone else is quite difficult and longer sentences I was unable to keep up. A place I could improve on would be trying to ensure I understand it completely and if not, ask to repeat or say I do not know.

Interpretive Reading

Reading was completed through the textbook and the discussion boards. Towards the end of class, we were starting to write in Spanish so there was some challenge to what we written by others. The text in the text book was well laid out and I would build each week on my fundamentals. I struggled in some of the modules where there was many changes of the base word to provide understanding of who was doing the activity.