Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication
Overall Reflection
Spanish 101 has been a difficult journey for me, as it has followed a long stretch since I have had any Spanish interaction at all. At the beginning of the course, I found myself being taken back by how little I could pick up on after having taken Spanish many years ago. I also found that the approaches of learning Spanish had transitioned from vocab memorization to more of learning the roots behind the words and how sentence structures worked. Despite this learning difference I found it helpful in better understanding sentences even if they used words that weren’t apart of our vocab because I could typically piece together what I meant.
Presentational Speaking
My greatest work in this course were our Flipgrid conversations. This is where we would be given questions or prompts and would need to record our responses. We would need to do this without any help form reading it off a paper etc. Which mean we needed to really know how to respond. I have attached an example of one of these Flipgrid’s to show you my response to our prompt of “describing who our favorite person was in a few sentences that we had learned”.
Exploring Culture
One thing that this course really explored was learning cultural practices and and how Spanish is impacted by the cultures themselves. One way I learned about cultures in this course was when I got to research 12 different celebrations in Spain for each month. After this research we chose the one that stuck out to us the most and compared and contrasted it to an American celebration. I have attached my findings from that research discussion.
I think it is extremely important to engage in your immediate and global communities! These experiences of engaging within community allow us to understand the rich culture of where we are and grow to better appreciate the life around us. I also think it is great to engage in communities when traveling and getting to understand what makes other cultures different and beautiful in their own way. I love how this adds a layer of context. One way I have personally experienced this was when I traveled to England and stayed there for three weeks. When Staying there we chose to stay with host families so we could be better involved in the communities and understand things like the typical home foods and routines.
*In an attempt to not overflood you with information I can provide more detail upon request*