I took SPAN 211 Intermediate Integrated Language and Culture I in my Fall semester, Sophmore year, to fulfill my World Language Perspectives requirement. This would be my final semester of having to take a language class and so I was excited to get through this class and completely fulfill this requirement. I was a little disheartened when I first found out that I would have to take this class in an online format, especially because of my prior experiences with online language classes in particular. While in high school we were required to take langauge classes, and so I chose to take German. This class was more of a hands-off instruction format where the students only interacted with an adult when doing speaking tests, and never once had I met or talked with any of the other students in my class. Because of this style, we were all generally left to our own devices in the classroom. I found that I constantly struggled with staying on top of the deadlines and did not do as well as I wanted to when final grades where published. Because of this, I was more hesitant when coming into this class and had to make sure to stay on top of myself for deadlines and giving an effort in the class. In addition to an online format, this class was also asyncronous with no professor meetups or classes, which made it even harder to keep it feeling like a real class. Despite this I tried my best to keep to a routine and turn in good work on time. It was about as hard as I was expecting it to be, and because of all the obstacles placed I feel I did not get as much as I wanted out of this class, and I was definitely disappointed in myself for not getting the grade I was hoping for. When looking back over how I participated in class and the results of my work, I can see that I still had some of my bad habits from my online German classes. I would wait until the last minute to finish my work and didn’t apply myself to the level I should have because of the added difficulty, and these are some of the reasons my grade dropped.
For this class, we had to complete a final project to show our knowledge gained from the entire semester through watching a video in Spanish, and afterwards completing the assigned worksheet about the information in this video. I found this as a difficult assignment because there was no English found anywhere in the video or the questions (save for the directions on the worksheet which told us what we were supposed to do) and so it took going back on all I could remember from this and previous classes as well as my notes to figure out the correct answers. I did find that it helped my understanding afterwards, though, in that I was able to better understand many different words and remember them as well. I think projects like this are important in a language class to help us get a better understanding for the langauge being learned, as well as to be able to better comprehend natural, real life instances of the language rather than having it read to us in a more academic, planned setting. From this class, I can now understand more Spanish and in the future hope to continue learning the language outside of school so I am better prepared should the need ever arise.
IPA 3 – Final Interpretar; Dr. Jennifer Barlow; Fall 2020. The final project completed in class where we were reqiured to watch a video in Spanish, and then fill in the following questions in proper Spanish to test knowledge gained from class the entire semester.