Dr. Hagan's Webcast Report

This week’s webcast with Dr. Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan was very informative. I learned that when a language is alphabetic, the consonant sounds transfer very well from language to language. Therefore, a teacher can be aware of the difficulties and problems regarding that area even if the child is speaking their native language. However, vowels, especially short vowel sounds, are very difficult for English Language Learners. Dr. Hagan then went into some detail about how to help with the vowel sounds, and one tool that came up quite often in the webcast was repetition. In my mind, there is only so much repetition a teacher can do until a child starts to tune out or get distracted. I know this based on my own experience with repetition when I was a child. She also said that a child needs about 12 exposures to a word in order to fully comprehend the context and sounds of that word. Dr.Hagan then stated something that was super eye opening for me. She stated “Students are more apt to respond and engage in language and conversation when it’s a small group rather than a large group, say of a classroom of 22 …show more content…
Hagan covered was being aware of cultural differences when it comes to the context of words. I am aware of different cultures and how it is important to understand and respect the beliefs, philosophy, ideas, etc. but I never considered that words could have different meanings in different cultures. At this point in the webcast I felt a little thoughtless because that was one thing I was not considering about cultures, and after hearing Dr. Hagan talk about it, I felt like that should have been obvious to me. In the webcast, Dr. Hagan used an example of an egg, and how eggs are used differently in the English culture vs. her own. Many people associate eggs with eating, such as scrambled eggs, however, Dr.Hagan associates eggs with rubbing them on your face in order to getting rid of bad spirits or karma because that was what her family used eggs