Exploring Culture

A couple products that helped me gain understanding of cultural perspectives was lingrolearning.com and talkabroad.com. Lingrolearning had culture sections where it would talk about different Hispanic culture from country to country; Lessons would show differences in social practices, foods, politics, and more. In talkabroad students would be exposed to Spanish speakers all over the world and have a 1 on 1 conversation in Spanish. In these conversations individual social practices, traditional foods, and favorite activities would be shared.

Engaging in Communities

Its important to engage with your community to stay connected with what’s going on on around you. The main way I engaged with the community was through lingrolearning. I did this by starting dialog on classmates project posts. Here are some examples:

Interpersonal Communication

Through doing these activities my communication skills improved because having real situations to speak Spanish aloud let me become comfortable speaking the language more and more. For example, my first talkabroad conversation was a lot more choppy and most of the time was spent trying to understand each other on a basic level. but by my second conversation it was more fluid and easy to understand each other, it was more complex and intuitive things we spent time trying to understand, this was due to the practice of the first one, lingrolearning practice and just becoming a more rounded educated Spanish speaking student. The talkabroad experience also taught me a lot about my partners culture.

Presentational Speaking

In Spanish 2 we I did a few presentational speaking projects. one of my favorites was an club advertisement filled with informal commands to convince people to join. Another one I liked was a health infographic filled with formal commands meant to promote good health. The thing that challenged me the most with both of these was translating my thoughts in Spanish wile also having the same Candance I intended my words to have in English.

Presentational Writing

In English, give a very brief 2-3-line description of the presentational communication of compositions, pamphlets, blogs, flyers, stories, articles, and any other written presentation activities you completed this semester inside or outside of class for or related to your Spanish learning. Include a copy of a written presentational activity you produced? (See Modes of Communication link for description and examples).

As you can see from the two flyers above, throughout the year I got really familiar with presentational writing.

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?

Doing these presentations

al writing exercises developed my skills at communicating thoughts exactly what and how I want to in Spanish. This was difficult at first but I persevered by just taking it one step at a time.

Interpretive Listening

The main way I practiced interpretive listening this year was through lingrolearning. There would be assignments that would ask me what nouns I heard or assignments asking me to determine true or false statements based off of an audio clip. This was difficult for me because the audios would often be fluent speakers who merge there words together and speak very fast but like anything else I became better at it by taking it slow and a step at a time.

Interpretive Reading

The main way I experienced interpretive reading was again through lingrolearning. some assignments would have you read over a brochure or something alike and identify the key take away. This didn’t pose too much of challenge for me but I definitely became more comfortable with identifying main passages of written matieral quickly.