Instructions

Exploring Culture

We learned about the different cultures through mainly postings from people from different people from those country’s. Our teacher also shared some of her own experiences living in Argentina and what it was like moving here. We learned a number of the different cultural differences between USA and these other countries.

The biggest difference that I learned about I was already slightly aware of but we learned about the differences in how we view family. This got me thinking about haw we think about family here, we see it here more as the people who are with you since birth and look after and take care of you until you leave. But in most of the Spanish speaking countries that we learned about it normal to stay with your family until marriage and even sometimes past that. Here we view family as people to rely on and they rely on you but there is distance room for who you are outside of your family. Over there it seems be your family is apart of who you are in a very real way. This does challenge the way I view family. I see family as the people in life who we can rely on, who we feel safe with, and who we choose to be with, and sometimes that isn’t the family we were born into. This influenced my thinking most when it came to how university’s work over there, it is pretty wildly excepted here that College/ University cost more here than most other places one of the things I had not considered is the lack of housing cost since most people stay at home through college.

Engaging in Communities

It is important to engage with the global community as well as local community because becoming more familiar with other cultures and traditions we eliminate this automatic fear of the unknown the which more often then not turns to hatred. This further separates us as a global community. I have had a lot of fun learning about these places and this culture that is different from my own but shares many things.

Interpersonal Communication

I’m not very confident when it comes to speaking so these assignments would really stress me out but I feel throughout the semester I’ve gotten more confident. Most of our interpersonal communication was done in class as a way of participating our professor would ask us a question in Spanish and we would answer in Spanish, or we would split off into small groups and talk to each other in Spanish.

One we did very often was small group conversations. Small group conversations tended to be spontaneous. These didn’t work as well for me just because I’m not very confident in my Spanish speaking ability so when we were cut loose my brain would freeze up a little bit and my partner and I would really struggle to get through the conversation. Something similar was our discussion board postings. Whenever we had a big project we would post them and we had to comment on at least three other classmates projects. This was I think the easiest form of interpersonal communication we would do in class, because it was preplanned and when we would talk about we would get a templet to follow. Everything that was provide to help with these comments was helpful but I didn’t learn much from this. I think the goal was to be a sort of capstone on what we learned that unit, so it was good review but if it was ever used as a jumping off point I don’t think it would effective at all. My favorite exercise we would do was in class the professor would split us into teams and we would have to compete in class. I found this fun but it also was a very engaging way to practice.

Presentational Speaking

We didn’t do many activities like this we had on project towards the beginning of this semester.

In this assignment I feel like i did ok just because I was reading from a script and I had time to look at my notes and make sure it wasn’t too far off from what I needed it to be. But if I had to answer these question of the cuff I don’t think it would be as clear.

Presentational Writing

Most of our presentational writing took place in projects like this. I really struggle with these assignments just because I’ve never been great at grammer. I tend to second guess my slef a lot on these

Then, in a paragraph, write a reflection that includes each of the activities you described above in which you explain how you have grown with each assignment or activity. What became easier and what was difficult? How did you overcome the difficulties? What did you excel at and why? How could you do better next time?

Interpretive Listening

Most of our interpretive listening activities were done through LingroHub. There would be an audio snippet and series of questions and we would have to answer these questions based only on what we heard in the recording. The rest were done in class when our professor would talk to us in class and ask us questions.

When it came to the LingroHub audio clips I had a very hard time with those exercises often I felt the person was speaking to fast for me to understand and I am better at understanding Spanish when it is written out in front of me. Which is why I felt more confident in class most of the time when our professor would ask us questions there was something written on the board so at the very least I had some context clues as to what he was talking about and therefor how I was supposed to answer.

Interpretive Reading

This is something that we split between LingroHub and class time. We would have exerts we would have to read and then answer questions. We would also respond to our classmates on certain projects or activities.

This is where I feel strongest when it comes to understanding Spanish. This allows my brain to go at its own pace. I can refer to old notes if I have to and all around I have an easier time understanding whats on the page because the only thing that changes when I read the words is the context in which I’m reading them. People have different inflection or ways of saying certain words or sounds with in words and the speed at which they say those words, when I’m reading a word it doesn’t change how that word sounds in my head.