Offering a grammar lesson guaranteed to make any English teacher cringe, President George W. Bush told a group of New York school kids on Wednesday: "Childrens do learn."
Bush made his latest grammatical slip-up at a made-for-TV event where he urged Congress to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act, the centrepiece of his education policy.
The event drew New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Education Secretary Margaret Spellings plus teachers and about 20 fourth and fifth graders.
During his first presidential campaign, Bush -- who promised to be the "education president" -- once asked: "Is our children learning?"
On Wednesday, Bush seemed to answer his own question with the same kind of grammatical twist.
"As yesterday's positive report card shows, childrens do learn when standards are high and results are measured," he said.
Bush is no stranger to verbal gaffes. He often acknowledges he was no more than an average student in school and jokes about his habit of mangling the English language.
Just this week, the White Houseinadvertently showed how it tries to prevent Bush from making even more slips of the tongue than he already does.
As Bush addressed the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, a marked-up draft of his speech popped up on the UN Web site, complete with a phonetic pronunciation guide to get him past troublesome names of countries and world leaders.
Vocabulary:
inadvertently:不注意地
