Audience Awareness Of English Majors In The Writing Process: A Survey Study

Nowadays, there are lots of Chinese writing researchers who found that the traditional teaching way of classroom writing, indeed, has some limitations (Deng Zhiyong, 2003; Han Liping, 2004). For example, students may have the problem of considering purpose, the lack of audience awareness and therefore, the lack of rich content in writing. These limitations affected the improvement of students writing abilities. Wang Wenyu & Wang Lifei (2003) said that the main problem of English teaching of writing in China is the lack of rich writing contents in writing. The contents of the teaching outline of English writing and the teaching materials seldom meet the demands of writing contents of students. In teaching English writing, most writing teachers adopt "Product Approach" in writing courses. That is, they just evaluate written texts as the final results of students' writings. In this way, writing teachers would like to focus on writing skills, such as the analysis or explanation of the patterns, grammar, spellings of words and so on in students' written texts. Students cannot improve their writing abilities under the influence of this teaching method.To make further inquiry into this, the author designed questionnaires and writing tests. Through questionnaires and textual analysis of research samples collected, the author proved that English majors also have weak audience awareness in their writing. Furthermore, the author found out that the current teaching methods of English writing have caused the appearance of single audience awareness in writing, i.e. with the writing teacher in mind. Most students thought that the writing teacher is the only one audience in their writings. So, they believed that the writing teacher is just the audience in their writings. There were on other people who have responsibility to assess their writings. In a traditional classroom teaching of English writing, teachers impart knowledge to students. Students are the receivers of knowledge. From the analysis of questionnaires, most students admitted that their writings has been changed from 'passive writing' to 'fossilized writing' under the influence of the traditional way of teaching English writing. This phenomenon rises from the test-based and traditional classroom methods of teaching English writing. To some extent, the fixed audience awareness causes the appearance of 'fossilized writing'. Taking this phenomenon in English teaching of writing as a base for research base, this paper focuses on how audience awareness affects writing process and written texts of English majors.Based on the research findings and the relevant studies of audience awareness home and abroad, the author analyzes how audience awareness affects the writing process of English majors in their writing processes. This paper includes six chapters:Chapter one introduces the background, aim and significance of this research.Chapter two refers to the findings home and abroad of the research of audience awareness.Chapter three describes the research methods, stages and instruments in this research.Chapter four adopts quantitative and qualitative way to discuss and analyze results of questionnaires, writing tests and interview of this research. The results show that most research samples have audience awareness in mind. However, under the influence of the traditional method of teaching of English writing and the limitation of time, students could not keep audience awareness in mind continuously in the whole process of writing. Therefore, generally speaking, audience awareness of research samples is not so strong.Chapter five, gives implications to the teaching of English writing, based on the discussion of the above four chapters: a) explaining the importance and necessity of audience awareness in writing course; b) designing the teaching plans for cultivating audience awareness of students; c) writing to different target audiences in training makes students write more meaningfully and interestingly.In the last chapter, the author got the final result of this research: in the writing process, English majors are affected by audience awareness more or less. Audience awareness is related to writing stages, affecting writing styles. With the consideration of target audience in writing, writing stages of research samples would recur and writing styles of them would change by different target audience.In a word, writing is a complicated dynamic process which is dominated by audience awareness, controlled by cognitive process and affected by psychological and rhetorical process. From the analysis of the results of this survey study, to improve writing abilities of English majors, it would be advisable for writing teachers not only to adopt the traditional teaching way of English writing, but also to keep audience awareness in writing process. Writing can be an active and happy thing to students. It needs the close cooperation of writing teachers and students in writing class and the writing process.