Exploring Culture
One good practice that helped me gain a better understanding of cultural perspectives includes the discussion board where we discussed about some of the differences between the U.S. and Spanish culture. The discussions allowed us to take on new perspectives and to gain new highlights of other cultures. One of the discussions talked about how other universities compared to our university. I wasn’t aware of the other universities that existed outside of the U.S., nor did I know the other countries that also had their own takes for each of their university’s websites. When I learnt about UGR through their website, it surprised me as it looked widely different from the layout of our university’s layout regarding content and groups.
Engaging in Communities
I cannot say with complete certainty that I’ve engaged with my immediate community, nor have I engaged much with the global community. Though I can say that I’ve seen some parts of the global community. One tradition that I learned about was the “Feria de Abril,” where a festival would take place for an entire week. In the tradition, people would celebrate with different kinds of food and putting on colorful and vintage attire to display their celebration in the festival.
Interpersonal Communication
There have been many occassions where I’ve participated in two-way communication. I’ve participated in several discussion boards, FlipGrid assignments, and an Online Conversation assignment. I’ve directly wrote and read posts on the discussion boards and exchanged my thoughts and opinions with other people, as well as taken the time to listen and to speak inside my FlipGrid Assignments and my Online Conversation Assignment.
Presentational Speaking
As previously mentioned, I’ve participated in several FlipGrid assignments that required speaking. Most of the topics needed to be replied to through English, but some of the topics did require Spanish responses.
The topics were varied and well-formulated, often requiring a lot of thought and effort to prepare each video post. One example includes FlipGrid Conversation M5, which required us to talk about someone we admire through Spanish. The person I chose was my grandmother, and I excelled in using proper verbs and present-tense forms of ESTAR and SER. While the video performed well, I wish that I took the time to improve my understanding of sentence sequencers in Spanish. Most of the sentences sounded rather monotonous and slow from my own perspective.
https://flip.com/groups/14741303/topics/37163357/responses/430658292/comments
Presentational Writing
For several assignments on a website known as LingroLearning, I’ve written sentences and paragraphs for my education in learning Spanish. These paragraphs are mostly for presentational communication of compositions and for recording the exploration into the world of Spanish culture.
I’ve also written several posts for most of the discussion boards in my Spanish Course. The discussion boards often challenged us by encouraging us to utilize the verbs and nouns we’ve learnt throughout each module. This gave us the opportunity to practice and review our abilities in writing through Spanish, and to take notes on what we can improve on and what we can avoid doing. One of my difficulties was the minimum amount of effort placed into writing some of the sentences, which gradually improved up to the point of the final discussion board. If I were given the chance, I would’ve taken extra time to review sentence sequencers and phrases from Spanish.
https://canvas.odu.edu/courses/130407/discussion_topics/640029?module_item_id=4780973
https://canvas.odu.edu/courses/130407/discussion_topics/640030?module_item_id=4780997
Interpretive Listening
Despite having a hard time with listening activities, I’m fully capable of understanding the words as long as they’re easy to understand. I’ve done well to listen to most of the activities, though there are improvements that will need to be made.
While I’ve had some minor difficulties in listening to the audio, I’ve been getting better at understanding some of the words through some minor hearing tricks. One of my tricks involves repeating small cuts of the audio to gain a better understanding on what words are being mentioned. What I found interesting about listening to some of the audios involves how some of the words are pronounced in Spanish, since there’s different sounds for most of the letters in the Spanish alphabet. It can make some of the English pronunciations of the words sound rather strange than their English counterparts.
Interpretive Reading
Reading the writings and narratives can be easy as long as the words can be used to understand what the situation or phrase is defined as.
Whenever it comes to reading, I can read the words as long as there isn’t anything that I don’t understand nor any words that I haven’t learnt through most of the modules. Even then, sometimes the words have their English counterparts which can help with defining the sentence and understanding its meaning. With each reading assignment, I’ve been able to recognize words in the text with more efficiency and focus. This has concluded with making it easier to understand most lines of Spanish and often makes it easier to recognize with what belongs in a sentence and what doesn’t. While the reading sections can be difficult through more advanced cases of Spanish, it’s still easier to understand the words than directly listening to them.
The assignment required reading the words and translating it to its corresponding English counterpart.
