Exploring Culture

Practices that have helped me gain an understanding of Spanish have been in the form Art, for example Music, which has stood out the most to me as far as my understanding of the culture. As well as the celebrations such as New years, Which I was able to celebrate with one of my friends in middle school. My brother is from EL Salvador and has been able to teach me some of the different things that go along with the culture.

The practice of music help me better understand because I have tons of family from El Salvador and lots of them have moved to the US and being around them and listening to the music they listened too in their country and the musical culture they brought in my life allowed me to start listening. My worldview was challenged because their are different types of Spanish cultures and they all have different traditions. It caused me to work through a stereotype I had because the way I was able to view the world after learning about the different cultures it allowed me to look at different perspectives of the cultures and how they each are separated from one another. For example, When I celebrated a new years with one of my friends who is from Puerto Rico the way they celebrate is by having a huge party and tons of family and friends come and celebrate the whole night, and the next morning you wake up and have a huge family breakfast.

Engaging in Communities

During my freshman year of being in college we held an event for the special needs, which was a day full of activities for them to interact with us by playing super fun games, as well as having a little bit of competition to it to allow them to have lots of fun!

Interpersonal Communication

This semester I was able to do lots of discussion boards, reading and writing activities in class. These were able to help me learn new things about speaking Spanish and writing. Especially the Lingo Learning activities, they allowed me to get a visual aspect and writing aspect of Spanish.

This semester we had to do multiple Flip Grid activities which it was like a “conversation,” with my Spanish Professor. We also did a oral conversation at the beginning of the year on zoom. I’ve grown a lot since the beginning of doing the Flip Grid activities because there were different questions each time and it opened up my communication of more of the basics. The difficult part was trying to understand the questions and knowing when to conjugate specific verbs that needed to be conjugated, I was able to overcome this difficulty by studying very hard and learning how and when to use conjugated verbs. Over the course of the semester I was able to excel in my knowledge of speaking Spanish and learning the different vocabulary as well as how to pronounce words that have accents to it. Next time I would probably try a little more harder to focus on the little details about Spanish and try to get a better understanding of how to conversate more.

Presentational Speaking

For this class some presentational speaking activities we had to do were our conversations from Flip Grid, these were similar to conversations being held except this was a recorded conversation. Over the course of the semester from the first flip grid I majorly improved each time on my speaking and knowing what was being said which allowed me to be able to do good on the assignments. Next time I would just practice a little bit more.

Presentational Writing

Mainly the only presentational writing I had to do were on the exams that we had to take, on the exams we just had questions and give explanations by writing short paragraphs to the question. I am not able to provide any type of presentational writing due to it being on exams.

The activities for me that became easier over this semester has been my Flip Grid activities each time it got easier to understand what was being said and I was able to speak a little more fluently on the conversations. Next time I feel like I could get better by practicing more because practice makes perfect.

Interpretive Listening

Some interpretive listening activities I did were on Lingro Learning and quizzes I was able to practice listening to words and write down what I heard and spell the word correctly.

Some things I listened to were some different types of music as a Spanish rapper named “Bad Bunny,” won the Best Latin Pop album in the Grammy’s and he represents his culture of music and I was able to listen to his music and understand tiny bits of things. Some things unclear were how fast he was saying the words and what he was speaking about within his lyrics. I found it interesting no matter what language you speak you can make it into a form of art. My takeaway was that many people can do this type of art.

Interpretive Reading

This semester for Interpretive reading I certainly had a lot of different reading activities from doing Discussion boards, Lingro learning, and etc.

The part that was unclear and challenging for me was certainly trying to figure out words that I had never learned within my field of vocabulary. Luckily I was able to use the Spanish Dictionary to figure out the words that I did not know and it was a very helpful resource throughout the year. My takeaway from reading is that you can break it down by each sentence and continue to learn what is being said throughout the whole story. I have grown from each assignment by continuing to read in Spanish and getting better every time.