21. Improving listening proficiency

2. Distinguishing fact from opinion
With the evolution of technology, information, and all sorts of means of communication, people have much more access to texts such as articles, news, and announcements than they did in the past. Nowadays nearly everybody with an Internet connection can post news and articles as they wish. Therefore, our learners must develop sub-skills to distinguish facts from opinions. Not only does it prevent them from taking wrong opinions as truths, but it also develops their critical thinking. These are very important twenty-first century skills. For this, readers must understand the relation between sentences, causes and effects and reasons. They also need to recognise indicators in discourse and marks of subjective language.
A short-circuit problem that may happen when distinguishing fact from opinion is when readers are not aware of discourse markers to show opinion, such as as far as I’m concerned, and indicators in discourse that express a shift from objective to subjective language, for instance lack of evidence. Then, it might be possible to get confused and take opinions for granted. Some basic learners might also lack knowledge of modals of possibility, deduction, and negative conclusion, such as may, might, must and can’t. Besides, the fact that readers might be biased by their own opinions can interfere in their interpretation. This means, they end up grasping points of view as general truths, instead of what they really are 一 personal beliefs. Therefore, we must help learners distinguish between what is meant and what is tendentious.
We need to raise students’ awareness of the discourse markers to express
opinions which are commonly used in the genres they are used to reading, intensively or extensively, and raise critical thinking as often as possible. Then, to deal with discourse markers, let us follow these steps. First, after the lead-in, students watch a video of two people discussing a piece of news. Then, they receive the script and are supposed to highlight discourse markers of opinion. Elicit others to bring background knowledge and encourage peer teaching. After, pull out some sentences from the text and ask some concept-check questions to check whether students think they are fact or opinion. Then, they read the news article the people in the video were talking about to mark facts and opinions. Finally, students are supposed to write a piece of news using discourse markers and being careful when shifting from fact to opinion. After that, get students to think about the importance of this knowledge.