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Antioch University Probes Obama's Speaking Elitist Isn't for English Language Learners

Andy Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears in the Huffingtonpost, The New Yorker and The New York Times, and at his award-winning humor site, borowitzreport.com. He wrote a very English teachers essay last week that let many speculating of the President-elect Barack Obama's style of speech.

Teachers in the grant with Antioch University had chose areas of their practice, to research via inquiry projects that examined both quantitative and qualitative student data, and aligned with best practices in teaching English Language Learners.As consequence, Antioch University released a free curriculum for working with English Language Learners which included strategies to cope with the complete sentences stirs controversy that Borowitz speaks in the Huffingtonpost.

The modeled strategies that TLC project proposed may:

Be adapted for use in K-8 classrooms;
Employ multiple teaching techniques for English learners, including those described in the CREDE standards (in Teaching Transformed, by Tharp, Estrada, Dalton and Yamauchi, 2000), and in Making Content Comprehensible for English Learners (Echevarria, Vogt, & Short, 2004);
Are collaborative and constructive;
Build trust and relationships among participants; and
Help participants learn about and reflect on the experience of English learners

There is nothing alienating in here and we don't think that "talking with complete sentences there and also too talking in a way that ordinary Americans like Joe the Plumber and Tito the Builder can't really do there, I think needing to do that isn't tapping into what Americans are needing also" as Borowitz cites.

Obama is a very educated man and we all love hear a person like him talking in such a perfect manner. We disagree with Davis Logsdon of the University of Minnesota when he says that "Every time Obama opens his mouth, his subjects and verbs are in agreement,...If he keeps it up, he is running the risk of sounding like an elitist."

Wow! Now results that if Mr President speaks correctly, it may sound jarring for some. Is this what students are learning as Critical Thinking?

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