A Pragmatic Study Of Audience Awareness In English Writing

Writing and speech are two major media employed in humancommunication. In a sense writing is written communication betweenwriter and reader, and the success of this kind of communication isdetermined by various factors, one of which is audience awareness.Audience awareness means that a writer realizes the existence ofhis/her potential reader during the process of writing and consciouslybuilds up a relationship. In other words, a writer should think about whowill read his/her writing before s/he writes, and adjust his/her writing tohelp his/her audience understand it when s/he is writing. Researches onaudience awareness abroad have a long history. Since Aristotle, audiencehas been seen as a key component in the rhetorical situation: "Of thethree elements in speech-making—speaker, subject, and personaddressed—it is the last one, the hearer, that determines the speech'send and object." (1954)Jack Rawlins once said: "Audience awareness ismuch crucial for writers because the key that separates good writing frombad is a sense of audience."(Jack Rawlins, 1999). Moffet directly andforcefully announced the need for greater attention to audience incomposition studies: "If anybody is going to do anything about theteaching of writing, the first priority is going to have to be the rekindlingof the sense of audience. Until that's done, nothing else is going tohappen. " (Squire Moffet 1977: 298). McAlexander (1996) also pointedout that one of the most important aspects of good writing was a concernfor readers' reactions, and college English writing instruction shouldfocus on techniques to strengthen audience awareness.However, studies in this respect seem to be insufficient in the field of Chinese college English teaching, and especially there are few studieson the theoretical foundation of audience awareness. The nature ofwriting is written communication in which the interaction between thewriter and his/her audience is not a direct face-to-face one and whichrequires more on the writer for the success of communication between thewriter and the audience. In order to cooperate well and succeed intransmitting message to his audience, the writer should take the audienceinto consideration and anticipate the audience's needs before and duringhis/her writing. According to Relevance Theory, in order to communicatesuccessfully, the writer will try his/her best to produce the kind ofutterances with the optimal relevance so as to help his/her audience getthe optimal contextual effect without paying too much effort. In actualcommunicative practice, a writer may strive for this purpose and have anevaluation of his/her audience's shared knowledge, cognitive ability,interest and need, etc before making a choice between the use of explicitexpressions and implicit ones. And this process is in fact the writer takingaudience into consideration. Therefore, audience awareness is a must forthe success of written communication.Important as audience awareness is in written communication, theauthor of this paper has found in her English writing teaching practicethat few students have realized the importance of audience awareness andquite a number of them rarely consider their audience and adjust theirwriting to help audience understand their writing. And even some Englishwriting teachers also neglect audience awareness in their teaching. Withinterests, the author of this paper analyses the comprehension obstaclescaused by English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' lack of audience awareness in the collected writing data and attempts to find out someeffective ways to enhance their audience awareness in their Englishwriting.Besides the introduction and conclusion, this paper is composed of 4chapters. Chapter 1 is a survey of writing. In this chapter the nature ofwriting, which is different from spoken communication and thus is amore complex process, is discussed. Because of the importance of writing,many researches have been carried out both abroad and at home. Butthere are few studies on audience awareness. Chapter 2 is a relevantliterature review. This chapter starts with the definition of audience, itscategories and the definition of audience awareness and then presents theintroduction of researches of audience awareness abroad and at home.And also in this chapter, the author points out the inadequacy of audienceawareness. In chapter 3 the author discusses the importance of audienceawareness guided by some pragmatic theories such as Grice'sCooperative Principle and Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory. Theauthor holds that writers' audience awareness means that writers shouldcooperate well with their audience and achieve optimal relevance for theaudience in order to succeed in the written communication. Chapter 4 isan analysis of the lack of audience awareness in some Chinese collegestudents' English writing. At last the author suggests some effectivestrategies to cultivate college EFL learners' audience awareness inEnglish writing instruction.