Exploring Culture

Practices that helped my gain understanding of cultural perspective are communicating with my family and visiting my home in San Antonio, Texas. I grew up in south Texas in a Hispanic family where my grandparents and other family members spoke Spanish. Though I never learned much I was immersed in Spanish/ Mexican culture through my family and the culture of San Antonio. This being through food, music, family, as well as my friends. My step mom is also from Acuna, Mexico and I have visited there as well as Cancun, Cozumel, and Monterey, and Progresso. There I have experienced the culture through food, music, shops, and history.

Though was not taught the Spanish language I know much and have experience the culture. I do not know through about other Spanish speaking countries. I want to learn more about the culture of Costa Rica after speaking with my partner on talk abroad.

Engaging in Communities

It is important for me to be able to both connect with my community through understanding Spanish culture as well as the language. With being a soon to be teacher I will most likely have students and families who speak Spanish and so it will be necessary for me to be able to communicate with them.

Interpersonal Communication

This semester I uses TalkAbroad to which is a website designed to allow people learning another language to have meeting with other people all around the world who are living in other countries and speak the language they are trying to learn. It allows for communication and practice with actually speaking as well as learning about the life and culture of others around the world.

The communication I had through out the semester was planned through TalkAbroad and discussion boards mainly. I was very nervous for my experience talking to my partner at first. She was from Costa Rica and I chose to talk to her because she liked some of the tv shows that I also liked. It was easy to communicate with her and she allowed me to take my time to answer and did not speak too fast or unclearly. I know that I still struggle with communicating rather than reading in Spanish so I was pleased to have had a good conversation. I did have some difficulty forgetting vocabulary words or not understanding exactly what she was saying so next time I would plan out better commonly used words or phrases to study as well as more questions to ask.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uPF1KvXPwp79pUb4ywV-F3nwUq9pELAo/view?usp=sharing

Presentational Speaking

This semester I practiced presentational speaking in through recording when I have to describe and introduce myself. I also slightly practiced this through one or two activities where we had to record.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ppEerGypCBIMVdVXGSvTkp6GB8Ncx1-f1ZqWgFQSJvs/edit?usp=sharing

I present my slide recording myself on slide 18.

In my presentation I introduce myself, talk about my birthday and age, where I am from and live now as well as other things to get to know me. I speak about my favorite color, movie, tv shows, and food. I even describe myself and what I like to do for fun. I was also nervous for this assignment but was able to complete it successfully and present my slide. Next, time I would practice more and become more familiar with being able to have more fluid speech as in a conversation.

Presentational Writing

Most of my writing in this course was done through homework on the VHL site. I would practice writing sentences, conjugating, vocabulary and more. As well as writing about myself and responding to classmates on discussion board posts.

I still struggle with my writing and more specifically conjugating and remembering the ways all the words change. I have become better at it but it is still a weakness that I have.

Interpretive Listening

I have practiced my listening skills mostly on the VHL site in home work, quizzes, and tests. I have practiced by listening to questions, statements, and vocab be repeated as well as tutorials. Then I would usually have to interpret the information and know if it is true or false or it makes sense or fill in the missing words.

I would struggle with listening to longer videos at the beginning but was able to become more successful as the class progressed. I still struggle to understand just by solely listening if there is not a text, photos, video, or at least some other way to help rather than strictly listening. I will be able to get better just by practice and hearing more people speak.

Interpretive Reading

I practiced my reading skills again through homework and quizzes. Reading would be done in basically every question and aspect as listening along with passages or pamphlets and flyers to interpret. I was most successful at reading and was able to translate situations or captions of pictures very well. I am able to read the short passages and mostly understand everything rather than if I were to be listening i most likely would not understand much at all.