https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Eemz_Rr-GzU5VS9zA1AZtI1MTbztESIg/view?usp=sharing – MODES TO COMMUNICATION
Exploring Culture
Something that helped me gain an understanding of the culture in Spanish-speaking countries was this “Contraseña: Texto” section in Lingrolearning. The screenshot below shows a story where the main character “Finita” goes on a journey of self-discovery when she decides to find her dad back in Cuba after she immigrated to the U.S.
When reading this story, I realized that my country and Spanish-speaking countries are not that different. We go through some of the same issues finding past relatives, having family members that immigrated to the U.S., and wanting to find yourself by researching your culture. I try not to think in stereotypical ways but learning about new perspectives has given me more insight into those countries.
Engaging in Communities
Throughout my time in SPAN 201, 90% of our time in class was allotted to having conversations in Spanish with our classmates. I think talking with partners and in groups with my classmates was a great way to get familiar with conversing in Spanish. The picture below is from an activity we did with partners where we had to pick the activity we used to do as kids while only using “yes” or “no” questions and our partner had to guess what we were talking about while only using “yes” or “no” questions, all in Spanish.
Interpersonal Communication
TalkAbroad is a website in which students learning different languages can talk to native speakers or 15 or 30 minutes. You can pick your speaking partner and even their profile to gain information about them so you have more things to talk about with them.
The video below is audio of my last, and in my opinion, my most flawed TalkAbroad conversation. I think our conversation went okay but I feel like it could’ve gone a lot better. We talked about how people from Nicaragua immigrate a lot to Costa Rica and the United States. I was surprised that I understood about 75/85% of my partner’s speech. I was able to put together almost exactly what she was saying through context clues and her hand gestures. I couldn’t add the entire video.
Presentational Speaking
The screenshot below is a project about what our ideal trip would be. I can’t upload the video because the file type is not supported but for the project, we had to submit the video with us talking in the background.
Speaking in Spanish is one of my strengths I would say. I feel like my pronunciation is always good and I enjoy trying to have conversations. I like these types of projects because I get to be creative and talk about things in Spanish that aren’t basic.
Presentational Writing
This is a project where we could pick a person and pick out clothes for them based on their likes and dislikes about their style. I had a good time with this project because I like talking about fashion so it was fun to do it in Spanish.
We had many writing projects and one thing I struggled with was keeping the word count. Reaching 200 words was very difficult for me. I would try to study and memorize exactly what I wanted to write but when it came to it, I would forget some of the things I wanted to write about. This specific project helped me because I was able to remember other things that related to my topic that I could talk about.
Interpretive Listening & Reading
I decided to add this screenshot and combine both of the interpretive reading and listening. The screenshot shows the ‘Texto: Yo tb tq’ section from unit 16.
This section gave a video showing how couples communicate in and out of texting on their phones. During the video they showed the text conversation and I had to interpret what they were saying in the conversation because they were using slang and abbreviations. I then had to listen to how a couple communicated while on a date. This was challenging for me because I have trouble listening to audio because I am not able to slow them down and because learning slang used during text is new to me. But I overcame this by going over it in class with my classmates and teacher as well as partner work and communicating with my classmates on what they could gather from what the text messages said.
