Seventh Task

Fake news seem to be a remarkable problem nowadays. Every internet user, television watcher, newspaper reader, or radio listener among others, might consider developing some critical literacy skills in order to differentiate fact from fiction. There are certain aspects in which a person can learn to differ what is a fact and what is fiction.

Regarding fake news popularity, it has been demonstrated that children are more likely to believe everything they read online as a truth. This becomes a problem in the way that homework or projects they may have will be vague and supported by unreal data. Children need to improve reading comprehension in the way the acquire knowledge from “reliable” sources. Therefore, teachers all over the world have the meaningful task of teaching their students to read, to comprehend, to separate reality from fantasy, and much more. Indeed, this may be accomplished by reading a wide range of texts for different purposes, learning about inference, and identifying how language structures contribute to meaning, according to an article by the Guardian, Jonathan Douglas (2017).

Moreover, in Colombia, reading is not as important as it is supposed to be because since Colombian people are very young, the culture of reading is avoided by their parents or professors. There are plenty of good texts professors or parents can implement in their contexts in order to encourage children to read. Professors need to go beyond encouraging students to read. Professors need to teach them to read critically. Nevertheless, nowadays in Colombia, the information we get from different sources seems to be biased since media needs to be oriented towards certain politics in order to “empower” the country, as stated by the government. Therefore, if the content of facts is related to something against the government policies, this is pointed out as unreliable and not useful.             

In brief, it is significant the fact that reading critically actually helps to differ what is real and what is not. In regards to learning to acquire the knowledge so as to discern fiction from factual contents, there are means to achieve the objective. Additionally, in Colombia there must be a wider reading culture to prevent students to take everything they read, listen or see as factual.