Revista simpozionului Eficienta si calitate in educatie 2018 Revista simpozionului | Page 11

10. Reports show that less that fifty percent of high-school students read at
an advanced level.
2 The students read the sentences and decide which sentences are factual (F) and
which contain elements of the speaker’s opinion (O). The teacher asks them to
underline the key words which indicate an opinion. These will be useful for
students to learn and use in their own writing. Here are the answers for the
sentences above with the opinion words and phrases from the sentences written in
brackets.
1 O (the hardest), 2 F, 3 F, 4 F, 5 F, 6 O (the most difficult), 7 O (heated, injustly,
old-fashioned), 8 F, 9 O (some of the worst), 10 F
The teacher directs the students to notice in particular how adjectives and adverbs
can quickly make something that is factual into something that also shows the
writer’s personal viewpoint.
3. Follow-up: Students do online research to find facts on a specific topic and then
write a series of sentences, some of which will be facts and some opinions. They
will then use the sentences as an exercise for their classmates, asking them to
distinguish between the facts and the opinions
Variation
4. Alternatively, pictures can be used instead of texts to teach the difference
between description and interpretation. Students can be shown pictures
accompanied by sentences and they have to say if the sentences represent a
description or an interpretation of the picture. Here are two examples, offered in
The American English (AE) E-Teacher Program - MOOC on Integrating Critical
Thinking into the Exploration of Culture in an EFL Setting:
This is a mother and a daughter. (interpretation)
Several people in this photo are raising their hands. (description)
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