Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication

Exploring Culture

Throughout the semester LingroLearning and TalkAbroad have helped me explore the culture of Spanish speaking countries a little more. LingroLearning had different sections where we would listen to native Spanish speakers talk about things they did where they were from. There were multiple countries, such as Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia. We listened to them talk about food they eat and how they prepare them, and they also talked about the different roles males and females had in their countries. TalkAbroad also helped with this as I talked to someone from Nicaragua and El Salvador. I got first hand insight on things they liked from their home countries, such as food they did and didn’t like, and activities they did.

These experiences helped open my eyes to the world a little bit more. Obviously, I know there are other places in the world, but not being there seeing or hearing it directly, it almost doesn’t come to thought most of the time. Being able to hear directly from people that live there, gave me a more personal insight onto different parts of the world.

Engaging in Communities

The community is a great place to learn when outside of a classroom. There are all types of people who can teach you all sorts of new things. There are people from almost every culture living around us. Talking to these people can teach you things you wouldn’t even know you didn’t know. They can also learn from you, if they aren’t from here you can be the one to teach them things they didn’t know.

For me, I have tried to go to different Hispanic restaurants and look at the different food items they have. Looking at the different ingredients in the meals is a good way to learn about the food culture they have in Hispanic countries. It won’t be exactly the same as how we prepare food in the U.S. It is also fun to try to understand people speaking in Spanish in public as I’m passing. I can’t make out every word, but sometimes I can get a pretty good idea of what they are talking about in the short amount of time we are near each other.

Interpersonal Communication

This Semester we did 2, 15 minute TalkAbroad conversations with native Spanish speakers. The 2 woman I had were Daniela Sofía Tejada who is from El Salvador and Sara Guiérrez who is from Nicaragua. We had prompts to talk about with each conversation, but the conversation wasn’t planned put completely. We had to think on the spot as we weren’t 100% sure what they would ask or say.

These assignments were very intimidating for me, I am a very socially anxious person and speaking to someone I don’t know is always nerve racking, add on top of that, that I’m speaking a language I’m not fluent in, is even worse. With that being said they weren’t that bad, they were even kind of fun. The hardest part for me was understanding what they were saying. I get used to hearing my professors accent, so hearing new accents was a small challenge. These experiences have given me a lot more confidence in my ability to speak Spanish to native speakers, outside of professors, my pronunciation of the words, and even helped with my social anxiety.

I think did better on the fist conversation with Daniela. We talked about our family’s (La familia) and described them. This topic is something I’m very familiar with as I’ve learned about this since middle school Spanish classes. Im pretty confident in my speaking ability about this topic, however hearing a different accent was a little off-putting at first. She made sure I felt comfortable and helped me out when I got stuck.

In the second conversation, with Sara, I feel like I did good. We talked about food and how to stay healthy (La buena salud y ¿Qué comiste ayer?) She is a slightly older woman and was straight to the point. Her being confident in herself made me feel a lot less confident. She could tell I was nervous and was very helpful, though. When I would get stuck she would type out the words in the chat, so I could hear her saying them as well as read them myself. This helped me exponentially. Again, with a new accent it was difficult for me to hear words I was used to, but seeing them written out definitely helped a lot. Both of these conversations were great experiences and I am very glad to have been able to do them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID6q3SK-wp0

Presentational Speaking

For one assignment we had to record ourselves talking about our families for 3 minutes. We had to describe ourselves and what 5 members of our family looked like and what they liked to do.

This was a new experience for me, I have only really ever spoken to the professor or class, not recorded it. I definitely learned that hearing my own Spanish accent is weird to do. In a quiet room where you can clearly hear yourself speak, when you’re already nervous is an unsettling experience to say the least. I got flustered a lot and had to keep starting over because I was trying so hard to get it right. If I had to do this again I would definitely just trust myself, trying to be perfect was making me mess up even more. This was a great way to practice pronunciation and my accent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m68cD2T0JdA

Presentational Writing

We had 2 assignment where we had to make a flyer for a club (Un club deportivo estudiantil) and an infographic about physical health or mental well being (Una infografía).

The first assignment about the club was pretty fun, I enjoyed making my swim club flyer. We had to come up with reasons to join the club, where it was, when it was, who was running it, and make it interesting. The hardest part for me, is coming up with stuff from scratch. I had to make up pretty much everything and then figure out what the words for that would be. On this assignment my computer kept taking out the tildes, and I didn’t realize until I got my grade, this showed me the importance of that aspect of the Spanish language.

For the second assignment we had to talk about how to stay healthy. We had to describe symptoms of being sick, how to protect yourself and preventative measures of getting sick, and resources if you did get sick. This assignment was pretty interesting because we had to use different tenses. This assignment was vocabulary heavy so it was a little easier. Vocabulary is easier to remember than trying to create sentences that make sense.

Interpretive Listening

On LingroLearning, the website we used to do all of our homework and projects, there were many listening sections. We had to listen to the speaker and pick the best answer based off of the question and what was said.

We had many sections on the site where we had to listen and pick out certain terms, different tenses, and answer questions based off of the audio. The parts where we had to pick out the tenses was probably the hardest part of this class for me. By the time I heard what was said and translated it in my head, there were 3 more words I had to do that with, so I had to listen to the recording a lot of times to get the gist of it. It was also sometimes hard to differentiate the words while they were talking. It was at a normal pace, so some of the words sounded put together sometimes, making it harder to understand. Throughout the semester, I feel like I started to do better with thinking faster and understanding better, but it was still a bit hard sometimes. Listening on my computer was better though. I could start it over as many times as I needed to be able to retain the information without having to inconvenience anyone. These exercises helped me translate faster in my head and helped me learn how to retain a little bit more information.

Interpretive Reading

This semester we were put into pairs and given a news article to read, about Mathew Perry’s death, that was entirely in Spanish.

This was completely new to me. I have never read an article in Spanish before. I’ve obviously read things in Spanish but not a news article with information that almost everyone around the world was talking about. Us being in pairs made this less intimidating, we would help each other out if one of us didn’t know how to pronounce a word, and encourage each other to read the article. There are a lot of cognates between English and Spanish, and that is especially evident in this article. Being able to see some words that I already know, plus the cognates helped me understand the article better.

https://cnnespanol.cnn.com/2023/10/29/matthew-perry-batalla-adiccion-autobiografia-trax/