Season 4, Episode 8

Empowering multilingual learners with Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan

Elsa Cárdenas-Hagan joins Susan Lambert to discuss challenges and opportunities in teaching reading to multilingual learners. She is a bilingual speech language pathologist and a certified academic language therapist. She is also director of Valley Speech Language and Learning Center in Brownsville, Texas. She explains how teachers can connect students’ home languages to English in order to honor their language and use new tools to help them understand English, and stresses the importance of learning about students’ home languages in order to spot orthographic and phonological similarities and differences. Lastly, she explains how important educator collaboration is for students’ success.