I am not a natural at learning new languages, but I do think it is an extremely valuable skill to have. Spanish is spoken in so many different countries around the world and there are so many different cultures connected to the language. It is extremely important, especially these days, to be able to communicate with a wide variety of people.
In these example assignments I am showing and explaining my growth in this subject and how they helped me better understand the language.
Presentational Writing
This assignment shows my ability to create a comprehendible story using the vocabulary and grammar tools that I learned throughout this semester. In this written composition, I am creating a report about two different patients who came into the emergency room and explaining both of their situations.
Presentational Speaking
One of our first assignments was to make a Flipgrid video introducing ourselves and what we liked to do. This assignment was useful because it helped us practice speaking the words we were learning out loud. We also had to make video comments on other students’ introduction videos. This helped us warm up to verbally communicating with each instead of just writing everything down. You can see that I am nervous in this video, but I have become more comfortable practicing Spanish out loud after this.
Flipgrid | SPAN 201 CRN 25494 @ 4:30 TTH
Interpersonal Communication
Whenever my professor would assign a Talk Abroad conversation I would get nervous. The people we would talk to were always very nice but they spoke very quickly and usually didn’t understand any English, so you were pretty much on your own.
But I noticed that in the second conversation I was able to understand the native speaker a lot better and I tried to elaborate on my questions and replies a lot more.
You can see the improvement in my conversational skills through these short recaps.
Example from first workbook:
Example from second workbook:
Interpretive Reading
In these reading assignments, we were given a small lesson or story that was written in Spanish. We were then given questions to test our comprehension. With practice, I have learned how to read through paragraphs and piece together the meaning by looking for key words and grammar tactics.
Interpretive Listening
I love seeing videos that portray aspects of different cultures in a colorful and exciting way. One day, our professor showed us a short video about a festival that happens in the town of Buñol near Valencia. It is called La Tomatina and it looks like nothing I’ve ever seen in America. People crowd the streets and engage in a lively tomato fight. Everyone is soaked in tomato juice but they look like they are having such a good time. Even though it looks pretty sticky and messy I kind of want to go to Buñol now!
This video “En el taller” shows mechanics working in a workshop. We were assigned many videos like this with several groups of questions that tested our understanding of a situation in a video so that we would recognize real-world situations better as well. Here is the video and the questions that I answered about the video.
