Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication 

Exploring Culture

This video provided information about some of the most important Spanish holidays for each month of the year.

The practices displayed in the video showed me a unique side to how history affects culture. In Spanish-speaking countries, there are historical events that are to be remembered as important and become holidays, just like there are in America. I learned that the cultures from this side of the world are both very unique but still similar to that of my own.

Engaging in Communities

Engaging your community is important and allows for the advancement of relationships and helps to create better connections between many different people.

As an educator, I have been able to connect with the students who make up a large and important part of our community. They are our future leaders and will be in charge of making decisions that will affect our society in huge ways. Engaging these students will make them better prepared for their future roles, and Spanish opens up this opportunity, at least for me, to reach more of them.

Interpersonal Communication

This activity instructed me to use my Spanish-speaking skills to participate in a conversation about college life which is entirely possible in my day-to-day experiences. I was able to complete the conversation using the words that I knew and applied to my own personal life.

This assignment and others like it that I have completed this semester have given me the ability to better communicate using the Spanish language. I first struggled to remember common phrases and would often mix them up. For example, I would mistake “¿Como estás?” and “¿Como te llamas?” at the beginning. I became better at understanding Spanish accents and understanding each word being said when listening.

Presentational Speaking

This activity is one where I was told to introduce the class to one of my loved ones. I was told to describe who that person was and a little bit about their character using what I had learned in Spanish.

I struggled in this area by trying to remember all of the adjectives used to describe people not only physically, but also their personalities. This became easier as I practiced and I found that there are many adjectives that have more than one word in Spanish that means the same thing in English. This gave me many more options on how to structure my sentences while I was speaking and if I got stuck I could just choose another word.

Presentational Writing

In this activity, I was to write about someone I know and provide context to who that person was in relation to me. I was also instructed to describe a few details about who the person is and what they do.

I believe that I did pretty well in the writing of Spanish, and prior experience taking Spanish in high school has given me a head start from some of my classmates. I do however want to challenge myself in the future because I would use basic descriptions like in the activity above to complete my writing.

Interpretive Listening

This was from an assessment from the final chapter of the course. I needed to find which words and phrases were being spoken and record them.

Listening portions are my favorite part of Spanish at least in a classroom format. Deciphering what I am hearing is almost fun and makes me feel like a code reader. I excel in the listening portions much more now than I did at the beginning after adding many more words to my personal arsenal.

Interpretive Reading

In this activity on LingroLearning, I was able to read a paragraph almost entirely in Spanish. I then used the word bank to fill in the blanks in the sentences so that it all was in context.

I struggled the most with reading and many times it was due to my not being able to remember the pronunciation of a word based on its spelling. This would then in my mind make a word unrecognizable and would leave me stumped. I believe that I can work on researching how each word in Spanish is pronounced and that will help me associate spelling to pronunciation, not to mention being able to pronounce the words when I speak them.