Exploring Culture

Throughout this brief semester, we have had several products and practices that helped me understand cultural perspectives such as videos, reading assignments, audio clips, and discussion board posts.

These practices helped me better understand values and attitudes in the Hispanic culture as well as my own by giving me a peek into the culture by exploring stereotypes, personal identities, social media practices, and more. I will admit that I don’t believe my worldview was terribly challenged because I consider myself generally very open-minded. My positive experience with learning foreign languages at ODU has caused me to cast aside whatever misconceptions I may have previously held due to all that I’ve learned. 

Engaging in Communities

The importance of engaging with one’s community and the global community cannot be overstated. We as people have a unique duty to look out for each other. The people who live within a community are all they have. As I have stated before, I am fascinated by how people within the Hispanic community take that sentiment to heart. It is obvious that collectivism and community run deeply within the heart of their communities, and whenever I reflect on that it makes me sad because America generally doesn’t operate in such a way.

 Interpersonal Communication

We were assigned two TalkAbroad conversations this semester, and I enjoyed both of them. This is now the second semester of having TalkAbroad conversations, and we were assigned two this semester. I enjoyed both of them because it is always a lovely experience speaking with a native Spanish speaker. For our first assignment, I spoke with Ximena from Colombia. She and I discussed stereotypes people hold about Colombia, and I shared with her stereotypes geared toward the Black community. Ximena made me laugh, and sold me on finally trying Colombia coffee! For my second assignment, I got to speak with Stephany, who was my partner for one conversation last semester. We remembered each other, and she was funny and kind as usual. Both of my conversation partners did a good job taking things slowly and making me feel comfortable as I still get pretty nervous speaking Spanish. These assignments have revealed to me that even if two people don’t always understand each other’s words 100% of the time, we can still learn something from each other. 

Presentational Speaking

We did not have any presentational speaking assignments this semester.

Presentational Writing

We did not have any presentational writing assignments this semester.

Interpretive Listening

We had quite a few interpretive listening activities like the videos before our homework assignments, and audio and video clips on quizzes and exams. Such exercises are always excellent practice when learning Spanish. Since I’ve been taking Spanish classes at ODU I find myself listening more intently for comprehension, which I even do when conversing in English. With interpretive listening, context clues are incredibly important, and I also enjoy that listening helps me make connections with how words sound in English. I am confident that my pronunciation has improved significantly in these last three semesters.