IPA-1 was the first IPA we completed in 204x. It challenged my analytical skills, translation skills, context association skills, and verbal skills. I had to interpret a deeper meaning from a text in Spanish and apply it to a real world situation through finding a main idea through context clues, cultural understanding, and a limited vocabulary. The artifact I have is an index card that includes what I did well and what I needed to improve upon. It also showed how assumptions cannot always be made and that your’e never going to be perfect.

I met expectations in the main idea category and the vocabulary understanding section but exceeded expectations verbally when put into the situation of being a travel agent and having to answer a customers questions without a script. I excelled in identifying supporting details, while not being sure of the main idea. I lacked on the vocabulary side of things. I was surprised by how natural conversing in spanish was and how I became the “leader” in my group with delegating tasks. I came to the assumption that I perform best in spanish when I have the situation tailored to me, not to the benefit of some commercial, historical text, or vocabulary wordbank.

Now, I know what my main weakness’s are; vocabulary and pulling a main idea behind a form of media or text. I know my strong-suits; verbal proficiency and supporting details in regards to writing ability. I can do more in the future in out of class time with learning vocabulary related to each chapter, and using context clues to make a more natural sentence in my writing. Also, I should spend less time during IPAs focusing on what small right answers I can get, and more time on the big idea, because without that the entire exercise is lessened. I am excited for the future of my spanish endeavors because verbally I exceeded expectations and hope to push them further into semi-fluency verbally. I hope to see the world some day and use those verbal skills to thrive overseas and further deepen my understanding.