Exploring Culture
The main ways I gained an understanding of culture was not through Lingro Learning but instead through my boyfriend and his family. Being able to experience their culture firsthand made it much easier to understand than just reading about it online. My favorite cultural differences that I learned about through him were the differences in how his family celebrates holidays compared to mine. I personally have always learned better through experience so being able to see these things with my own eyes helped me to better understand and appreciate it. For Christmas especially I loved the differences in how his family celebrated in comparison to my own. Being able to experience how his family celebrates gave me a huge appreciation and understanding that there are many great ways to celebrate holidays.
Engaging in Communities
Being able to actively engage with your community is very important because it can help you to expand your view of the world. Being able to have the opportunity to interact with others can help you understand and experience different people’s opinions and viewpoints.
Interpersonal Communication
Even though the TalkAbroad assignments were stressful and daunting they were also very helpful overall. Being able to communicate with someone thousands of miles away is amazing to me because I get to learn about them and where they are from. I also found TalkAbroad to be a great learning experience because I got to practice speaking Spanish with someone whose primary language is Spanish. Besides TalkAbroad I have had many chances to practice my Spanish speaking over my school breaks with my boyfriend’s grandparents because their primary language is Spanish. They have been very patient with me and have helped me a lot! Because of all of these experiences, I have been able to pick up and understand more of the conversations spoken in Spanish around me.
Presentational Speaking
In my opinion, being able to speak in a different language feels very rewarding. One of my favorite assignments from this semester was from a LingroLearning assignment where we had to pick a poem that had ties to hispanic/american culture. I really enjoyed this assignment because I love poetry and I really enjoy reading it aloud because while reading poetry aloud you are able to give life to the words. During this units project I read a poem aloud. The poem I chose was called Mano a Mano by Anthony Orcorzo and it is about more of a call to action to unite everyone as one.
Presentational Writing
For the most part all of our LingroLearning projects this semester have all been video assignments. The only written assignments were the ones that we would do in class after the projects were submitted. I honestly found the writing assignments to be more of a struggle compared to the speaking assignments. This in part was due to the fact that when it comes to spelling or conjugating words I have always struggled. In the end after the editing process I was always able to learn from my mistakes and I eventually got better at my writing.
Interpretive Listening
For the most part listening activities were done through LingroLearning homework assignments. These assignments typically consisted of listening for specific words or phases in order to test my understand of what was being said. LingroLearning also provided videos that we would watch in order to comprehend the current unit that we were learning about.
Interpretive Reading
Like many of the other assignments done this year the reading assignments were done through LingroLearning. Depending on my familiarity with the unit’s vocabulary would then translate to how much trouble I would have with reading the content for those particular units. In order to set myself up for a higher chance of success I would copy down that unit’s vocabulary in colored pen in a notebook that way I could go back and study it whenever I needed to. Being able to go back to study these vocab words whenever nessasary helped me become more familiar with the words and phases that might pop up in that unit’s reading. This particular study technique helped me the most and it is what lead me to understanding more of the readings.
