Interpretive, Interpersonal, and Presentational Modes of Communication

Exploring Culture

In LingroHub, we had a few homework assignments that helped me understand culture. There was an assignment on LingroHub that had us pick a country and research the types of food they are known for, we talked about family roles and how they might be different from our own, how we stay healthy, and much more.

With all these activities, I got to learn a lot about Hispanic culture and things that are valued. For example, for our last few assignments and our second TalkAbroad, I got to talk with a women from Columbia. We talked about how she stays healthy, how I stay heathy, and what we both like to eat; just from food alone can show a lot of culture. Talking with my partner didn’t necessarily change my world view but I definitely learned about some foods I have never heard of before. I don’t normally eat Hispanic or Columbian foods and I don’t like spicy things and Hispanic foods can be a little spicy, but, it opened my eyes a little more to it because the food my partner showed me looked very good.

Engaging in Communities

Engaging in your community is very important. Talking and getting to know people can help you in many different ways; it can set you up for a job, provide connections for you for said job, increase trust which leading to increased visibility and understanding of issues and empowers communities to have their say over decisions that affect their lives, their towns, cities and neighborhoods. Globally, engaging in community is also very important. Global community engagement enables government and public decision-making organizations listen and in time demonstrate the impact of community contribution. Community engagement, then, builds deeper, stronger and more trusting relationships between public organizations and communities.

This is a picture of me and two of my other teammates engaging in our community by helping Freshman move into Gresham dorms earlier this year.

Interpersonal Communication

TalkAbroad is an online website that you can pick anyone to talk to from any Spanish speaking country; it is very cool. We also did a lot of FlipGrid videos with the class. Since this was an online class and I didn’t know anything about anyone, nor did we ever seen each other in person, making the Flipgrid video’s and responding to them helped a lot with connecting to the class.

I know that TalkAbroad really helped me in this course. Even though we only had 2 conversations, I could definitely tell a difference form how I communicated in the first one and improved for the second one. TalkAbroad challenged me because it was really out of my comfort zone. The first one I was very nervous and wasn’t sure what to expect but I did end up liking it and felt accomplished after the conversation. It was also difficult because we were talking to fluent Spanish speakers with accents. It wasn’t too hard to understand them most of the time but when I didn’t know what they were asking me, I asked them to repeat it and I could normally get it the second time.

The assignments I think I was the best at were the FlipGrid conversations. They were the best for me because I had the time to replay the video if I didn’t know what was being asked and I could prepare my answers and make sure most of it was correct. I was much more relaxed when we did the FlipGrid video’s.

Presentational Speaking

In module 7 we did a Flipgrid talking about how we maintain good health. Professor Mitchell pre-recorder herself having a conversation and we filled in the blanks and answered her questions.

https://flip.com/groups/13627529/topics/32988696/responses/394374024

This FlipGrid was one of our first presentations and the first one that our class had to respond to. We had a second FlipGrid due in November talking about how I take care of myself. These challenged me because I wasn’t able to understand some of the questions the first time I heard them. I was able to overcome this challenge by going back in the video, taking my time, and picking out the words I did know and piece together what the question was asking. Other presentations we did were the TalkAbroads. Those were difficult because it was a live conversation with a fluent Spanish speaker but I was able to overcome the challenges by practicing and listening for the words I knew and interpreting what they were saying. The FlipGrid presentations were the ones I was able to excel at because I could rewind and take my time formulation and answer to the questions.

Presentational Writing

The main way we communicated as a class was through the Discussion Boards since this was an online class. Professor Mitchell would post a video for us to watch, questions for us to answer about the video, a sentence or 2 in Spanish about the topic, and then we had to reply to two of our classmates posts.

I believe we did about 10 DB posts all about different topics. Looking back from the first one to the last one, I see growth in my grammar and being able to use tenses mostly correctly. Being able to write a complete sentence in Spanish became much easier but being grammatically correct was much harder. I tried to overcome the difficulties by practicing and focusing on the assignments on LingroHub. But overall, I also think the DB were one of my stronger assignments in this class.

Interpretive Listening

Over this semester, I think the best listening activities we did was the TalkAbroads. Other listening actives we did was the conversations in FlipGrid and assignments in LingroHub. In one of our DB we had to watch a YouTube video about people’s favorite sports.

Since these were fluent people answering the question in this video, it was a little more difficult for me to understand but I was about to pick up on which sports were their favorite. I found that most people liked basketball, tennis and soccer the most. I expected more people to say soccer first because I know it’s really big over there and was surprised when most of them liked basketball the most.

My takeaways from the listening experience was that you can understand a lot from knowing a little if you can pick up on just a few words. I have grown for each activity because we were constantly learning new words so, the more we learned, the more I was able to understand conversations and listen.

Interpretive Reading

Then, write a short reflection paragraph that includes the activities you described above. What was unclear or challenging for you? How did you overcome this difficulty? What did you find most interesting or compelling? What was your takeaway from the reading? How have you grown with each assignment?

When we were learning about Spanish foods, I got curious and look up the most popular Spanish foods to see if it would line up with the DB8 video we watched. So, I found an article and started reading it and found a few meals that I saw in both the video and the article. I like new foods so it was very interesting to see how the foods I eat and grew up with differ from the Spanish foods.

https://www.spain-holiday.com/Spain/articles/top-ten-spanish-foods