Exploring Culture

I gained knowledge of spanish cultures by reviewing the cultural exploration sections in lingrolearning. I also gained knowledge of their cultures by context clues of reading what activities they participate in.

It made me understand the values and attitudes of spanish speakers by learning they have a separate word to respect elders or people in a higher position. It made me realize the personality difference of using more facial expressions when speaking. I learned about how they do different things like take naps after work or live at a slower pace. They changed my worldview by opening up more questions of how people live differently.

Engaging in Communities

It is important for the local community to engage with each other to learn from and help each other. Students often times learn better by talking together about the subject. Global communication is important for understanding each other’s cultures. It is also very beneficial to learn a language from a fluent speaker.

Interpersonal Communication

Spanish-Comments

Students completed many discussion boards by commenting on each other’s projects in spanish. Students did partner and group conversations in spanish and posted them. Afterwards everyone made comments on the posts.

The conversations and discussion boards helped me learn more by engaging in actual discussions in class, holding spanish conversations. The comments helped students learn by knowing how to state opinions and agreements in spanish. I grew in the conversations by using the vocabulary realistically as it would be used instead of individual words. My difficulty was grammar and memorization of accent marks, I overcame this by understanding the rules of when they are used. I was good at conjugating verbs because the concept is similar once you are used to it. I learned new vocabulary and how to speak more fluently in spanish. Next time I would try a different study technique.

Presentational Speaking

One presentational speaking activity was a student and partner held a spanish conversation on their class schedules and majors. Another speaking activity was students gave a tour of the school describing their favorite places. Students’ used spanish vocabulary of verbs and nouns to describe what is at and what they like to do at those places.

spanish-convo-proj

Above is a typed conversation submitted of a spoken in class conversation.

The challenging part of the conversation with the partner was getting the correct speed and fluency of the conversation without making mistakes. We overcame the challenge by practicing multiple times off camera. Certain parts of the conversation we excelled at such as introduction questions like, what is your name and where are you from. The challenging part of the school tour project was memorizing the vocabulary for the video. I got past the challenge by practicing multiple times beforehand. I was good at knowing the general concept of what I was going to say. Next time I would practice the timing of my videos more before recording.

Presentational Writing

spanish-paper

This writing was on a project students wrote about their class schedules. It helped us learn times of the day, days of the week, and verbs of common activities.

I grew in this assignment by being able to easily combine nouns and verbs with a wide range of vocabulary to say what I do in a day. I can now combine days of the week, times, and activities to say what I or other people do. It became easier throughout time to conjugate verbs correctly. I was good at knowing verbs already because I already knew a lot of them from previous chapters. I could do better next time by having more overall consistency on using the vocabulary.

Interpretive Listening

Many of the lingrolearning assignments had audio sections of listening to people saying the vocabulary words. This helped in knowing and understanding the pronunciation. There were audio examples of entire conversations and singular words.

Examples of different things I listened to this semester were a conversation between two new students about their degree and different classes they were taking that semester. We listened to two people have a conversation in spanish about making plans to do something at a certain time and how to cancel it. We heard audio examples of people explaining their schedules and things they like to do at the university. It was unclear when I was new to the vocabulary and the speed was too fast. I overcame this by using context clues and replaying the recordings several times.

I found the most interesting section the one of spanish speaking students touring the university. My takeaway from listening to the audio recordings was having a better understanding of how fluent spanish speakers actually talk. I have grown by knowing how to speak spanish myself from listening to people who actually speak it.

Interpretive Reading

spanish-culture-reading

Students read posts of spanish speaking students about what their schedules and lives were like at the university in their country. We also read email or text conversations between people about things like their schedules and making plans to do things.

We learned that a lot of spanish speaking countries do not have dorms at universities. We also learned that many spanish countries take naps after lunch and other cultural differences. Reading the conversations helped by seeing how the vocabulary would actually be used giving realistic examples. I found most interesting the fact that many spanish speaking countries take naps after work. The most challenging part was being new to the chapters that had a lot of vocabulary. I got passed this challenge with practice. I grew in this by being able to read spanish and pronounce the words easier mentally.

When you have finished adding content to this page, delete all the instructions except the link to the Modes of Communication.