Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication

Exploring Culture

Through my travels to different countries I enjoyed experiencing other cultures. This has helped me provide different perspectives in which other countries live. It is important to understand cultural perspectives in order to keep from offending or being disrespectful. Through interactions and self awareness it helped me gain general understandings of the cultures in which I found myself.

One thing I am aware of is that you cannot force political or personal views on a culture, every culture is structured differently and have their very own beliefs. In order to better understand you have to put away personal bias and absorb any amount of knowledge and information about the culture. Having an open-mind has helped me throughout all my experiences in different cultures, along with the willingness to learn and accept that I am a guest in a host country.

Engaging in Communities

It is important to actively engage and bring self-awareness and understanding of your community in order to create ways that will positively effect not only your community but other communities around.

One of my most humblest reflections comes from a deployment in Afghanistan. While out on a patrol we lived in a village amongst the people. A very poor country, I always made it my responsibility to interact with the village children whether we played games or I provided them food and drinks. It would always made me feel good to see the smiles on their faces even, though there was so much conflict around them. Moments like these are ones that I will forever cherish.

Interpersonal Communication

Communication is the foundation to learning and understanding a language and just about everything else in the world. During class we communicated everyday through class participation, TalkAbroad assignments, and various other activities. These were important in order to gain knowledge and help grow in learning the Spanish language.

Each week in class we cover various topics from the weather, to clothing items and places to shop to my favorite topic food. The more we dove into each topic I could tell my vocabulary increased each time and I was starting to understand the professor more. From the first assignment (FlipGrid) where we did basic introductions to our immersive TalkAbroad conversations I could see my understanding and growth in the language expand. Although some parts were difficult the professor would help us revisit lessons from previous topics to bring better understanding. Next time I think that in order to really grasp the knowledge and understanding I should spend more time working on extra assignments and practicing speaking in the language. No better way to learn and grow than to actually practice and use it.

Presentational Speaking

Presentational Speaking is one of the most important forms of learning and understanding the language. We did a lot of presentational speaking whether it be in the form of participation in class (we weren’t allowed to speak in English), though our TalkAbroad assignments, or our interview with the professor.

The TalkAbroad was probably my favorite assignment because we had a chance to interact with people from other countries in order to emerge into the Spanish language. I found this a little challenging just because it was like taking training wheels off your bike for the first time. Communicating with native speakers with a language barrier can prove to be difficult at times, however through my preparation I was able to complete the assignment and the conversation flow in my opinion was pretty good.

Presentational Writing

During class we were asked to write two compositions to gage our overall written comprehension of Spanish. These assignments provided good insight in what we did well and what we need to work on. Below is an example of one of my writings based on my favorite restaurant.

The use of this assignment was very helpful in gaging our written comprehension of the language. The first was I did was an interview with a friend based on clothing trends during each season. I didn’t do very well due to lack of preparation. I made sure to prepare better for the assignment above, but then again we are talking about food and who doesn’t love to eat. The difficulties that I find myself having is following proper sentence structures. I felt that my flow and proper word conjugations are what I excel at through repetition and studying each words stem. I could probably do better if I spent more time going over powerpoint presentation and through more writing assignments.

Interpretive Listening

The class was primarily built on interpretive listening, the professor would only speak in Spanish while presenting each lesson. She would present YouTube videos and ask questions based of things we heard or through

At the beginning of class I felt that it was very difficult to understand the professor, but she was very well versed when it came to translations to help us understand each lesson. The difficulty that I had was trying to understand what was being said. I overcame this through active listening by trying to listen for verbs and nouns that I was already familiar with in order to understand what was being said. I found it very interesting how sophisticated the language really is by avoiding redundancy. Although the language is spoken very fast my biggest takeaway would be that in order to understand the conversation you really need to listen and pay attention what is being said to avoid miscommunication. I felt that I have grown through each activity and increased knowledge of vocabulary with each lesson that was covered.

Interpretive Reading

Our interpretive Reading came in the form of our “Lectura” assignments along with instructional guidance from the professor whether it be examples from our book, powerpoint lessons in class or we would periodically have a “Kahoot” quiz. Below is an example of a slide from one of our instructional powerpoint lessons.

Reading is one of the basic fundamentals that can help with learning another language. Classroom instructions were very through as the professor would make sure she took the necessary time to present the powerpoint lessons in a way that would be very helpful in learning. It was difficult at first because every lesson was in Spanish, but through readings in the book I could see my vocabulary increase and I would begin to recognize words and phrases. Without taking the time to read and constantly study up on words and sentence structures it would be hard to complete the course.