Audience Awareness In English Writing: A Study Of English Major Students

The importance of audience awareness and keeping a connection with audience in writing has been now widely acknowledged. However, most research in this area has been focused on the influence of audience awareness on writing performance. To fill up the research gaps of previous studies, this study aims at exploring the overall situation of audience awareness in EFL writing context by focusing on students' attitudes toward and perceptions of audience awareness, availability of audience awareness to students, its influence on writing, the representations of students' target audience, ways to realize their audience awareness.The sources of data for this study include open-ended questionnaires, interviews, and sample writings, supplemented with think-aloud protocols. One hundred and five English-major students of a comprehensive university participated in this study, four of whom were chosen as the participants for think-aloud sessions. All of them were required to fill up two questionnaires and complete a writing task. Four students were then asked to finish the think aloud sessions. Both responses to the questionnaires and think-aloud protocols were elicited. The writing products were analyzed by referring to Hyland's (2005b) engagement system.The results indicated that most students acknowledged the importance of audience awareness and the necessity of cultivating audience awareness. However, students' perceptions of their own audience awareness were not in consistency with their performance. Despite the different target audience in their mind when writing, most of them took the teacher as their audience. In addition, the study found that students' ways of realizing the audience awareness mainly lied in formal aspects including organization, sentence, and vocabulary, even though they used some engagement features in the meantime.The study concluded that audience awareness is of significant importance to effective writing yet students were not strong in having audience awareness and using proper ways to realize their target audience. It suggested that the training of audience awareness is the foundation to enhance students' audience awareness and a long-term plan and effective methods are of necessity on the part of teachers. The limitations of the study and suggestions for further research are finally provided.