Exploring Culture
TalkAbroad helped me gain better understanding of cultural perspectives. Using TalkAbroad allowed me to explore the Hispanic culture with someone who lived in a Spanish speaking country and realize that someone from a Spanish speaking country is not as different as I assumed.
Another great assignment that allowed me to explore more into the Hispanic culture was Proyecto 21 when I was exploring the tradition of Día de Muertos. I was extremely intrigued by this celebration and was able to appreciate it’s value to the Hispanic culture when doing research for the project. I had a great time researching information for this project and thought it was a great way to explore the culture.
Engaging in Communities
It is extremely important to be involved in your community and the global community because you can meet all types of people. Especially as a bilingual individual you have the opportunity to communicate with many more individuals and get to make connections across your community. There are many opportunities were you can volunteer and meet other individuals who share similarities as you.
Interpersonal Communication
TalkAbroad is a great tool for interpersonal communication and allows individuals to connect from all around the globe. These assignments have definitely opened up my thought process of the world outside of America.
I was shocked that my TalkAbroad partner and I knew many similar brands and influencers. I was nervous for this assignment at first but it was really fun and interesting once we began. TalkAbroad is always interesting but I am always nervous before I begin. Overall, I was happy with my performance and it made me realize how fast and fluent native Spanish speakers are. Although I had to ask my partner to repeat herself a few times I still feel like we had a good conversation and got to learn about each other. This assignment made me realize that we are all not as different as we may seem. We share similarities in our lives and made me rethink what I previously thought about cultures outside of the United States.
Presentational Speaking
I had many presentational speaking opportunities throughout this semester with all of my projects especially Proyecto 17, 18, 19, and 21. These projects as well as class participation allowed me to effectively speak Spanish across multiple different topics and units.
These main challenge of these projects for me was trying to remember the dialogue. I looked at a script to keep me on track throughout the recording but overall feel good about how these projects turned out. I could do better by trying to memorize my scripts better next time or by recording the videos in segments so I will not have to remember as much.
Presentational Writing
The most rigorous and effective writings I had this semester was the second part of our projects when we had to write the second part in class with only vocabulary words from the unit. This was hard but good practice to learn how to properly write in Spanish.
Although this was difficult it made me more confident because if I didn’t always perform well on the rough draft then I could learn from my mistakes and correct it before turning in the final copy. This also helped practice repetition with the language and get more used to writing in Spanish. Although I did fairly well on the projects I am still gaining confidence on my writing skills and will continue to work progress my work.
Interpretive Listening
The most intensive learning activities I did this semester were in Lingrohub and listening in class. I had to listen to an audio and pick the answers that corresponded with audio as well as listen to my professor and classmates.
Sometimes I struggled with these and I overcame this by listening to them multiple times and breaking down the audio into different parts so I could gather all of the information. But overall I did good on these assignments I just had to take more time to complete them. I gained more comfort overtime with these assignments and they definitely helped improve my Spanish capabilities. In class I became more comfortable as the semester progressed and realized I can understand the language better fairly well.
Interpretive Reading
There were many interpretive reading assignments throughout the semester from many assignments in Lingrohub, participation assignments in class and especially reading the short story “Viaje a la Universidad” in Unit 19. Lingrohub had many assignments where we had to read information and use that information to complete our assignments.
I enjoyed the assignments when I felt like I was exploring the Hispanic culture and found it interesting but sometimes challenging. There was a lot of information in these assignments but it was very information and I got to use my Spanish knowledge to complete the assignment. Sometimes I would look back at the information provided because it was easy for me to get mixed up with the information.