Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication

Exploring Culture

In life, it is not unusual for people to want to go out and explore and try new things. Many people say that they would love to travel to places all around the world, but a fair amount of those people may not understand that when traveling, to get the full experience, you need to engulf yourself in the culture of the area you are visiting. I find personally that learning about the culture of an area I am visiting or learning about enriches my experience more than anything else could. Since the second grade, I have had a friend whose family is from Puerto Rico. For the past 15 years, I have been around her family constantly, listening to their Spanish, learning Spanish from them, eating the food customary to where they are from, and just finding myself completely fascinated with the different culture. I have not traveled anywhere foreign as of right now, but I have a trip to Madrid in the works. I plan to fully submerge myself in the culture while I am there, and simply cannot wait to experience so many new, amazing endeavors.

Engaging in Communities

Engaging in your immediate, as well as global, community is essential to growing as an individual. There is something about being involved with people and making a difference, no matter how small, that fulfills me. A goal of mine everyday is to make someone’s day, or life, even just a smidge bit better. Now that I am employed as a SPED TA in a middle school, I encounter children from all types of backgrounds, intellectual challenges, and attitudes towards life. It is so extremely important to me that I do all that I can to have a lasting impact on not only the children, but their parents and my coworkers. It is beyond enriching to know that I may forever hold a special place in someone’s heart, or in a community’s foundation.

Interpersonal Communication

Although Spanish 101 was an online, asynchronous course, I was still able to practice my Spanish listening skills through activities offered in LingroLearning, as well as recorded conversations and audio files. I also worked with two of my peers to converse in Spanish, which was extremely helpful to be able to use what I had learned in conversations with my partners. I also met with Dr. Guadano on two occasions, which I ultimately benefitted from, although I was very nervous initially.

Due to this course being online and asynchronous, it was a lot more difficult to grasp the material and put my knowledge to the test. To my advantage though, I had about 5 Spanish courses under my belt prior to this class, which gave me an amazing foundation to start off on for this class. I definitely did miss the in-class Spanish conversation opportunities and frequent reassurance from my instructor, but I know that regardless of that, I did make improvements from the beginning of the course since I was pretty rusty with my Spanish. I am very excited to take Spanish 102 next semester with Dr. Guadano, and I will definitely take any opportunity presented to me to meet with him or my peers to practice my speaking abilities.

Presentational Speaking

Throughout this course, I had multiple opportunities to create presentations in Spanish in which I was able to practice my pronunciation and formulation of sentences to create entire 2-3 minute videos. There were some where I just talked about myself, and others where I talked about where things are located on campus or people whom I admire and those I do not particularly admire. These activities are what helped me the most in this course I believe, because they offered a time for me to formulate what I wanted to say and to perfect how I pronounce my words.

While creating these presentations, I found that I seemed to excel at formulating my sentences I had created. Spanish can be tricky to understand exactly what is needed in a sentence and what order the words go in, but due to my past Spanish classes, I felt pretty confident in my ability to do so. The hardest thing for me in the beginning was mastering pronunciations, but I can definitely tell a difference from when I first started speaking Spanish in my freshman year of high school. I am excited to continue my learning of Spanish, so I can be even more confident in not only my sentence formulation but my pronunciations as well.

Presentational Writing

In addition to the oral presentations in this course, we also had assignments where we had to write entirely in Spanish. This encouraged me to go more in-depth with my writing, by learning new vocabulary words not addressed in this class, and as well as using my past knowledge to my advantage.

In this artifact I provided, I wrote a letter nominating my best friend Danielle, for the best person award. There were a lot of instances in this assignment where I had to sit back and think hard abut what I had previously learned in my other Spanish courses to help me excel at this assignment. I also consulted to Spanish dictionary to aid me in finding the correct words I wanted to use when describing Danielle and why she deserved the award.

In English, give a very brief 2-3-line description of the presentational communication of compositions, pamphlets, blogs, flyers, stories, articles, and any other written presentation activities you completed this semester inside or outside of class for or related to your Spanish learning. Include a copy of a written presentational activity you produced? (See Modes of Communication link for description and examples).

Interpretive Reading

During this course, we used to site LingroLearning to complete a lot of the coursework. Throughout the modules in LingroLearning, there were many reading passages such as emails, texts, and letters, that we had the task of deciphering and answering questions about. These are a lot easier to comprehend compared to listening activities because you can look at the entire passage and decipher small bits to help you with the overall passage.

I genuinely liked the reading assignments because they allow you to see the many different words in different forms and conjugations, which really helps with better understanding what exactly you are looking at. Again, my Spanish background benefitted me a lot with these reading assignments, because I am very familiar with a lot of common words used in sentences and the forms they belong in in different instances. I think one of the best opportunities to increase your Spanish knowledge is to read passages and try to begin deciphering the different parts until the passage makes sense to you.