Exploring Culture
I found a lot of value and help with doing the research outside of class to try to find answers to new vocab words or finding the soundings and sounds for all of the words and letters on my own time through independent studies.
This practice help me be able to speak more fluently and be able to have a better grasp on the material outside of class. Sometimes with the homework assignments it can be tricky to pick up on the material because it is being graded right then and there when you learn it so being able to make mistakes at no cost and just be able to teach myself the needed information was extremely important to me and helped me feel more confident in class.
Engaging in Communities
It is important to engage with our community and our surroundings by knowing the stereotypes that all people can have about them. Stereotypes are unfortunate descriptors that people use to identify certain people and kind of label them so they know what to expect before they can even meet the person. Everyone has a stereotype so it is important to understand them and try to combat them by being open-minded.
Interpersonal Communication
For one of our assignments, we had to give a small presentation on an event that happened in our life and how it had impacted us. We were to talk in the past tense show what we have learned about speaking in the past and demonstrate why that event was so significant.
The biggest thing that really challenged me this semester was being able to understand how to talk and present projects like this one orally understand all the pronunciations and how to confidentially be able to speak about the topic. I think in my projects I would be kind of stressed and worried about pronouncing things correctly so I would stumble over words and not be confident but the more I focused on pronunciation and vowel sounds it changed the way I spoke and my confidence level.
Presentational Speaking
One presentation we had to give this semester was about our favorite influencer. We had to speak about who they are, what they do for the community, how many followers they have, and what about them connects with you.
I really excelled in making the presentation as lively as possible. I think I really made sure that whoever was watching my presentation was having a fun time watching and they were liking whatever they saw. I think something I can do a better job with is making sure I have all the information needed in these presentations because there were a few times I didn’t have everything I needed in them and I lost points so making sure all elements are in the presentation would definitely help.
Presentational Writing
In this activity, we had to look over a poem in Spanish and not only understand what the poem was talking about but also be able to analyze it and understand the main ideas and biggest points while putting ourselves in the author’s shoes.
I started to realize that I might not be the best at Spanish speaking and pronouncing Spanish but I Spanish am good at writing and dissecting it and figuring out how to handle going through Spanish text or writing my own Spanish text. I think what really helped me was using the vocabulary we used in class but also using most of the text from the passage that I could implement in my own passage to really tie all of the main ideas back together to showcase full knowledge of the material.
annotated-Untitled20document20-20Google20Docs-3-1Interpretive Listening
When we did our listening activities a lot of them had come from lingro. we would listen to a person tell us something and we would have to match up the correct answer to maybe a vowel sound or the correct conjugation as a means to test our listening comprehension.
The biggest thing that challenged me with these was being able to understand the people talking and what was actually going on and being said. A lot of it is very mumbled and it is kind of hard to hear everything that is happening all at one so that was the biggest challenge for me. I would often try to just listen over and over and hopefully be able to understand after I listened a few times.
Interpretive Reading
One of the biggest texts I read this semester was this sonnet I read and had to analyze. it is a story about love and I loved reading how passionate the author was. Even in another language, I felt how pretty the words were and how it all flowed together.
I think what was the most unclear was how I was supposed to understand all of these words that I had never learned in this intermediate Spanish class with not really being allowed to use any help from any other source. But I do think this was a great assignment to be able to feel out different texts and literature from different backgrounds and different authors.