Reflection
In Spanish 101, I had to relearn everything that I was 100% confident on years ago. I gave myself goals like listening to more Spanish and working on comprehending and to be more confident in knowing my vocabulary, greetings, time, and basic greetings. At the beginning of the class, I was extremely frustrated because I have studied Spanish in high school and I was one of the top students in the class. However, I didn’t use it or continue studying much over the years and I seem to have lost it. This was and has been one of my main challenges in this class. I’ve seen the material before and have learned it but now it seems like rocket science. For example, in high school, I could write an entire paragraph and do it would be done correctly. My main goal has been to not only retain the information, but to be able to actually use it consistently. In the beginning of the semester, I extremely struggled with dialect and pronunciation. Now I feel as if I have improved. I am still not where I want to be but I feel like if I keep working hard and studying, I’ll get there. I have been working through this challenge by constantly speaking words out loud, watching videos on how to pronunciate words, and taking notes on everything I did. This was extremely difficult because I had to look up how to pronounce the words I needed so that I say them correctly. Another challenge I have been struggling with is comprehending the entire sentence. As of right now, I have been listening for key words and using context clues to understand the sentence. I feel like I am the most weakest in pronunciation and responses. I know that I can comprehend enough to use context clues to understand the what is being said. To overcome these weaknesses, I will continue to practice but I will also speak more with native or strong speakers that can help me grown while I am outside of class. In order to grow and try to achieve my goals, I write and draw everything out so that I can remember. For example, I struggled to pronounce the letter ‘X’, so I wrote it out how I thought it sounded in my head. So I wrote out, “eh- kee-s”, which made it easier for me to pronounce because I can see it. As the semester comes to an end, I look forward to taking the knowledge that I have learned and using it next semester.
Artifacts
First Spanish 101 class Video, Introduction
This video was the first video assignment required for my Spanish 101 class. It was an introduction of ourselves. In the video, I struggled with pronunciation and fluidity. In this time, I was just picking everything up in order to relearn this language all over again. After this video, I sat down and rewatched it. I took notes of what I could work on and continued to work on it.
Most recent Flipgrid assignment on our favorite person
This video was the last video assignment that we had to do in Flipgrid. In this video, I felt more confident with my words. Although my sentences and pronunciation weren’t perfect, there was a lot of improvement from the first video. This is just a snippet that shows that over the semester I have improved and if I keep working harder, I can be better and continue to improve.
This is a screenshot of my virtual notebook. If I were to continue to scroll down, there would be more notes and more drawings. In my notebook, I write notes that I can understand. These notes are written to meet how my mind works. Each page has a different concept such as questions, definitions, conjugations, and more.
Exploring Culture
Throughout this class, I had opportunities to learn more about Spanish culture. I’ve tried different foods, taken salsa and tango dance classes, connected with Spanish speaking singers, and more. Within each experience, I learned something different and each experience offered a different feel. In taking a salsa/tango class, I learned how the steps and the origins of certain steps. I found it very intriguing and different but also fun. When I first met my boyfriend, he played a song called, “princesita” by Karlos Rose. This song is very special to me and I actually had a chance to speak with Karlos. I asked questions about his music, why he switches from Spanish to english and which language seemed to be the hardest to him. He said english because he’s always spoke Spanish. Karlos also offered to sing the song at our future wedding which I am extremely excited. He also told me about his experience with being Dominican and the types of issues he faces. This helped me understand more about the culture because I got to get information from a native Spanish speaker and I got to learn about his personal experiences. I have eaten at many Mexican restaurants but I had the opportunity to eat at a Puerto Rican restaurant in Virginia Beach called De Chinchorreo. I got to learn the different names for the foods while listening and learning the owner’s specific dialect and style of speaking.
These practices and experiences helped me better understand the values and attitudes in the Hispanic culture as well as my own because I got to hear about others’ perspective and experiences. I also got to learn about their specific traditions and cultures and how it made them the person who they are today. The practices also challenged my worldview because it allowed me to unlearn misconceptions and assumptions about Hispanic culture and it allowed me to participate and learn in order to understand and feel included.I experienced many challenges in this learning process. The challenges that these perspectives revealed to me was that all Spanish culture has the same traditions and that although they come from different areas that they all spoke the same Spanish (formal and informal). This made me have to unlearn the stereotypes and misconceptions that I had been taught and gave me the opportunity to learn the truth. By doing this, it helped me understand that in order to understand a culture and its traditions, that you have to learn from the native people and not what others teach you.
Engaging in Communities
It is important to learn the value and importance of engaging in the immediate community as well as the global community because it allows one to truly get the hands on experience and to know which specific cultures exist in that community. It is also important to understand the values because it teaches tolerance, compassion, new information, and respect for other cultures. I was able to participate in the musical, “In the Heights” which allowed me to connect more into the Hispanic community because many of the cast members were Hispanic or of Hispanic descent. The picture below is of the cast members on the set we used (a small portion). During this time of getting more into the community, I learned that engaging in the community teaches values and brings people closer. It’s like a family. When one person hurts, the community is there to pick them up. Engaging in the community is a life changing event.
This picture is from, ‘In the Heights’ 2022 which was performed at the Academy of the Arts in Lynchburg, VA. During this time, I was able to work on my Spanish, learn more about the culture, and experience traditions and customs.
Presentational Speaking
In this class, we were required to record our responses from our professor’s initial video. Each prompt was different and in each video, I came across many obstacles. I struggled with pronunciation, comprehension, and my overall responses. I have not been able to access my ‘Spanish’ accent which makes what I say sound incorrect. In order to overcome these challenges, I recorded numerous times in order to look back at my previous videos and correct the mistakes from them when redoing my video. If I had a chance to redo every one of these, I would try to use more Spanish dialect and try to respond more smoothly.
This video was another assignment. The instructions were to respond to what the professor was saying as if it was a regular conversation. This assignment was hard for me because it was my first time doing a video in which I have to respond in Spanish or another language. From watching this video, it helped me in my growth process because I had more time to analyze my response. We didn’t have many of these assignments but each one allowed for improvement in a specific area. I feel as if I excelled more in the comprehension of the dialogue and that I was able to know how to form my next sentence/ my response.
Presentational Writing
I mainly did the writing portion on our discussion boards. In the discussion boards, we would have a prompt and be required to write in either Spanish, English, or both. In these discussion boards, it allowed me to not only read or listen but to write in response with no hints or help but to learn to do it by myself. The more I did the assigned discussion boards, the more easier writing in Spanish got. We also had a few writing portions on our exams and the discussion board helped prepare me for that. The only difficulties I had was where certain words would go in the sentence. For example, in english I would say ‘the white house’, in Spanish I would have to write ‘la casa blanco’. This made writing difficult because I had to push my learning to the side in order to write a correct sentence in Spanish.
This is a picture of one of our discussion boards. I had to use Spanish and English in order to answer the discussion board. This was challenging because I didn’t know as much Spanish needed to write numerous sentences on the topic given. I overcame this by doing the best I could and doing what I know how to do. This helped with growth because I won’t always have someone to double check my Spanish or tell my that it needs to be fixed in certain areas, so it taught me to be confident in my skills.
Interpretive Listening
Throughout the semester, I listened and heard different things such as music (different styles of Spanish music), conversations at stores and restaurants
In this video, I was able to listen to my professor’s questions and respond. This was another flipgrid assignment. In this video, listening came harder because I couldn’t understand some of the words due to the accent but I pushed on and was able to finish the video. When listening to someone speaking Spanish, it is hard to understand because the words seem so quick and unclear. To overcome this, I continued to listen to the video over and over and analyze each sentence. Throughout this listening experience, I feel that it helped me prepare for the listening portions of my exams and it went more smoothly because of the practice I had. In each activity, I took something I learned from the previous activity and made sure I practiced and emphasized the corrections more.
Interpretive Reading
On the exams, there was sections that required reading and had questions based off the article/ paragraphs. I did better with these sections because I can see the words which takes away the struggle of having to separate the dialect from the dialogue. There was some sentences on each exam that was tricky because I genuinely didn’t understand it. However, I used the sentences around it in order to get better comprehension on what I was reading. Since it was on exams, I don’t have the links but I do know that most of them were email styled and was written for a recommendation or a check up email on family.
