CRITICAL READING

EVALUATING WRITTEN TEXTS BY ANALYZING CLAIMS

PICTURE OUT.

Your phone vibrates, signaling a new message. You open the message. It is from an unknown
number. But, what catches your attention is its content:

You have just won Php 100,000 from a contest! The only thing you need
to do to claim your prize is to provide your personal information, along
with some credit cart details.

Would you do it?

WARMUP.

1. What is critical reading?

2. List the traits (5 minimum) a critical reader should possess.
3. Which situations below require critical reading skills?
a. Looking at a map for directions to a new restaurant
b. Reading survey results on voters’ preferences for elections
c. Following directions in a cookbook
d. Watching a music video on YouTube
e. Looking up sources for a class report

Answer in full sentence form.

CRITICAL READING

 Involves evaluating claims, seeking definitions, judging information, demanding

proof, and questioning assumptions
 Goes beyond passively understanding a text
 Thinking critically
DEVELOPING CRITICAL READING SKILLS TECHNIQUE #1.

Keeping a reading journal

 Involves writing your feelings and ideas in reaction to your reading assignment
 Allows you to develop your impressions of the text and connect them to your
personal experiences
Steps
1. Have a separate notebook.
2. Include the titles of the reading assignments you are responding to.
3. Add dates to your entries.
EXERCISE.

1. Pick a quote in the speech, The Policies and Achievements of the Government and
Regeneration of the Filipino, that you find interesting.
2. Write a 2-paragraph reflection in connection to the text picked.
DEVELOPING CRITICAL READING SKILLS TECHNIQUE #2.

Annotating the text

 Making notes on your copy of the reading
 Includes highlighting or underlining important passages and writing notes, comments,
questions, and reactions on the margins
EXERCISE.

1. Make annotations on the speech, The Policies and Achievements of the Government
and Regeneration of the Filipino (minimum of 20 annotations).
DEVELOPING CRITICAL READING SKILLS TECHNIQUE #3.

Outlining the Text

 Locating the thesis statements, claims, and evidence, and then plotting these into an
outline
EXERCISE.

1. Outline the speech, The Policies and Achievements of the Government and
Regeneration of the Filipino.
 Elements:
I. Thesis Statement
II. Claims (5)
III. Evidence (5)
DEVELOPING CRITICAL READING SKILLS TECHNIQUE #4.

Summarizing the Text

 Consists of getting the main points of the essay and important supporting details
 Locate the thesis statement and topic sentences.
EXERCISE.

1. Summarize the speech read.

 Elements
I. Thesis Statement/Introduction (2 sentences)
II. Body (5 sentences)
III. Conclusion (3 sentences)
DEVELOPING CRITICAL READING SKILLS TECHNIQUE #5.

Questioning the Text

 Involves asking specific questions on points that you are skeptical about
 May be topics that do not meet your expectations or agree with your personal views

Answer
1. What type of audience is addressed?
2. What are the writer’s assumptions?
3. What are the writer’s intentions?
4. How convincing is the evidence presented?
5. How reliable are the sources?
IDENTIFYING AND ANALYZING CLAIMS

Determining explicit and implicit information

 Critical reading also means that you are able to distinguish the information that is
clearly stated (explicit) in the text from ideas that are suggested (implicit).
CLAIM

 Writer’s point of position regarding the chosen topic

 Central argument or thesis statement of the text
 What the writer tries to prove in the text by providing details, explanations, and other
types of evidence
 Defines the paper’s direction and scope
CHARACTERISTICS OF GOOD CLAIMS

1. Argumentative and debatable

2. Specific and focused
3. Interesting and engaging
4. Logical
TYPES OF CLAIM

Claim of Fact
 States a quantifiable assertion, or a measurable topic
 Asserts that something has existed, exists, or will exist based on data
 Relies on reliable sources or systematic procedures to be validated
 Answers a what question
TYPES OF CLAIM

A claim of fact takes a position on questions like:

What happened? Is it true? Does it exist?
Claim of Fact Example:
“Though student demonstrations may be less evident than they were in
the 1960s, students are more politically active than ever.”
TYPES OF CLAIM

Inappropriate claim of fact – a statistic or fact that is not debatable:

“the month of March 2017 was 1.03°C (1.9°F) above the 20th century average—this
marked the first time the monthly temperature departure from average surpassed
1.0°C (1.8°F) in the absence of an El Niño episode in the tropical Pacific Ocean.”
(from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Adminstration, NOAA, https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global/201713 )
TYPES OF CLAIM

Appropriate claim of fact – makes a claim that is debatable using factual evidence
Decreasing carbon dioxide emissions from car exhaust, manufacturing processes,
fertilizers, and landfills, while slowing deforestation, may help slow the process of
global warming.
TYPES OF CLAIM

Claim of Value
 Asserts something that can be qualified
 Consists of arguments about moral, philosophical, or aesthetic topics
 Proves that some values are more or less desirable compared to others.
 Makes judgments based on certain standards, on whether something is right or wrong,
good or bad, or something similar.
 Attempts to explain how problems, situations, or issues ought to be valued
TYPES OF CLAIM

A claim of value takes a position on questions like: Is it

good or bad? Of what worth is it? Is it moral or immoral?
Who thinks so? What do those people value? What values or criteria should I
use to determine how good or bad?
Claim of Value Examples:
Video games are a valuable addition to modern education.
It’s better to apply good nutritional choices at home than teach them at school, because good
nutrition then becomes ingrained in the child’s experience.
Although immunotherapy has produced some good results in fighting cancer, overall it is less
effective than chemotherapy.
TYPES OF CLAIM

Claim of Policy
 Posits that specific actions should be chosen as solutions to a particular problem
 Usually begins with should, ought to, or must
 Defends actionable plans
 Answers how questions
TYPES OF CLAIM

A claim of policy takes a position on questions like:

What should we do? How should we act? What should be future
policy?
Examples of Claim of Policy:
Sex education should be part of the public school curriculum.
The city’s board of education should institute an honors program not only for high school
students, but for elementary and junior high school students as well.
Just as smoking ads have been banned in order to decrease the urge to engage in an
unhealthy behavior, soda ads should be banned for the same reason.
IDENTIFYING THE CONTEXT OF TEXT DEVELOPMENT

Context
 Social, cultural, political, historical, and other related circumstances that surround text and
form the terms from which it can be better understood and evaluated.
Guide to discovering a reading’s context:
1. When was the work written?
2. What were the circumstances that produced it?
3. What issues confront it?
INTERTEXTUALITY

 Modeling of a text’s meaning by another text

 Connections between language, images, characters, themes, or subjects depending on
their similarities in language, genre, or discourse.
 Text is always influenced by previous texts and in turn anticipates future texts.
 Becomes a dialogue among different texts and interpretations of the writer, audience,
and the current and earlier cultural contexts
INTERTEXTUALITY

Intertextuality Examples:

 The main plotline of Disney’s The Lion King is a take on Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
 The structure of James Joyce’s Ulysses is modeled after Homer’s Odyssey.
 J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series makes use of T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone,
C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
INTERTEXTUALITY

Intertextuality Examples:
 Wide Sargasso Sea (By Jean Rhys)

In his novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys gathers some events that occurred in
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The purpose is to tell readers an alternative tale. Rhys
presents the wife of Mr. Rochester, who played the role of a secondary character in
Jane Eyre. Also, the setting of this novel is Jamaica, not England, and the author develops
the back-story for his major character. While spinning the novel, Jane Eyre, Rhys gives her
interpretation amid the narrative by addressing issues such as the roles of women,
colonization, and racism that Bronte did not point out in her novel otherwise.
INTERTEXTUALITY

Intertextuality Examples:
 A Tempest (By Aime Cesaire)
Aime Cesaire’s play A Tempest is an adaptation of The Tempest by William
Shakespeare. The author parodies Shakespeare’s play from a post-colonial point
of view. Cesaire also changes the occupations and races of his characters. For
example, he transforms the occupation of Prospero, who was a magician, into a
slave-owner, and also changes Ariel into a Mulatto, though he was a spirit. Cesaire,
like Rhys, makes use of a famous work of literature, and put a spin on it in order to
express the themes of power, slavery, and colonialism.
HYPERTEXT

 Nonlinear way of showing information

 Connects topics on a screen to related information, graphics, videos, and music
 Information appears as links and is usually accessed by clicking
 A reader can skim through sections of a text, freely jumping from one part to another
depending on what aspect of the text interests him/her.
 You are given more flexibility and personalization because you get to select the order
which you read the text and focus on information that is relevant to your background
and interests.
HYPERTEXT
Hypertext Examples
IDENTIFYING ASSERTIONS

 Declarative sentences that claim something is true about something else

Types
o Fact – statement that can be proven objectively by direct experience, testimonies, witnesses,
verified observations, or the results of research
o Convention – way in which something is done, similar to traditions and norms; depend on
historical precedent, laws, rules, usage, and customs
o Opinion – based on facts, but difficult to objectively verify because of the uncertainty of
producing satisfactory proofs of soundness; result from ambiguities
o Preference – based on personal choice; subjective and cannot be objectively proven
FORMULATING COUNTERCLAIMS

 Claims made to rebut a previous claim

 Provide a contrasting perspective to the main argument
Guide to formulating a counterclaim:
1. What are the major points on which you and the author can disagree?
2. What is their strongest argument? What did they say to defend their position?
3. What are the merits of their view?
4. What are the weaknesses or shortcomings in their argument?
5. Are there any hidden assumptions?
6. Which lines from the text best support the counterclaim you have formulated?
FORMULATING COUNTERCLAIMS
FORMULATING COUNTERCLAIMS
DETERMINING TEXTUAL EVIDENCE

Evidence
 Details given by the author to support his/her claim
 Reveals and builds on the position of the writer and makes the reading more interesting
 Includes:
1. Facts and statistics
2. Opinions from experts
3. Personal anecdotes
CHARACTERISTICS OF GOOD EVIDENCE

1. Unified
2. Relevant to the central point
3. Specific and concrete
4. Accurate
5. Representative or typical
DO MORE.

1. Imagine that you are an editor for your school paper.

2. Your teacher has given you the freedom to choose any opinion article about the
ASEAN integration.
3. Review your chosen article (should consist 1,000 words).
a) Identify the claim of the text.
b) Describe its context.
c) Evaluate the evidence provided.