The Effects Of Audience Awareness On Drafting And Revising

Audience awareness is a kind of consciousness that the writer sets his reader in the writing process,trying to establish and maintain a relationship with the reader in order to attain the goal of writing,or it refers to a psychological factor that the author thinks about his reader’s needs at every moment and tries to cater to the reader’s needs.Studies on audience awareness at home are latter than that abroad.In recent years,the domestic studies of audience awareness mainly concentrate on the issue that whether Chinese students have the audience awareness.These studies only emphasize the theoretical aspects of the audience awareness,and most studies appear in recent ten years.The present study chooses two writing period: darfting and revising to analyze the change of the students’ audience awareness after receiving the stimulus materials;the effects of audience awareness on non-English majors’ overall English writing proficiency and discourse coherence.There are three research questions: 1)What effects will stimulus materials(some questions can stimulate students’ audience awareness)have on audience awareness of non-English majors in drafting and revising? After giving the stimulus materials,is there any significant effects of stimulus materials on students’ audience awareness? 2)What effects will audience awareness have on overall English writing proficiency of non-English majors in drafting and revising? Is there any significant difference between drafting and revising? 3)What effects will audience awareness have on discourse coherence of non-English majors in drafting and revising? Is there any significant difference between drafting and revising? The90 subjects of the study come from Lanzhou Jiaotong uiversity,and they are freshmen in non-English majors.All participants are divided in to three groups at random.Before the test,there is a pre-test from the three aspects: audience awareness,writing proficiency,and discourse coherence.In drafting,only G2 receives the stimulus materials,and in revising,only G3 receives the stimulus materials.At the end of the experiment,all participants are asked to do the question.The questionnaire is to test the audience awareness;the grade criteria of composition in CET-4 and CET-6 is to test students’ writing proficiency;the coherence rating scale is to test students’ discourse coherence.This study discusses the research questions by analyzing the questionnaire and the essays.It employs qualitative and quantitative research method.Through SPSS16.0 statistical software,all data are processed and analyzed,based on which the research findings are made.First,the author uses One-Way ANOVA to analyze the data in pre-test.The results indicates that there is no significant difference among three groups in audience awareness,writing proficiency,and discourse coherence.Then,the author uses paired samples t-test to anslyze the data in pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire.The results reveals that there is no significant difference of audience awareness in G1 between pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire,but there is significant difference of audience awareness in G2 and G3 between pre-questionnaire and post-questionnaire.Also,the author uses One-Way ANOVA to analyze the data of all students’ writing proficiency and discourse coherence in drafing and revising.The data shows that there is no significant differece of students’ writing proficiency and discourse coherence in drafing,but there is significant differece of students’ writing proficiency and discourse coherence in revising.There are six chapters in this paper.Chapter one introduces the research background,the purpose of the study and the significance of the study.Chapter two reviews the literature.Chapter three expounds the theoretical basis of the present study.Chapter four describes the research design,including research questions,research subjects,stimulus materials,research instruments,research procedure and scoring.Chapter five shows the results and discussions of the research results.Chapter six ends the study with some of the important findings,some implications and suggestions for the future English writing teaching and learning.The major findings of this research are as follows: 1)Stimulus materials can enhance the audience awareness of non-English majors.Students’ audience awareness is significantly raised after being given some stimulus materials.2)Audience awareness has a positive effect on overall English writing proficiency of non-English majors both in drafting and revising.However,it only has significant effect on revising not in drafting.In other words,the effects of audience awareness on overall English writing proficiency of non-English majors in drafting are less effective than that in revising.3)Audience awareness has a positive effect on discourse coherence of non-English majors both in drafting and revising.However,it only has significant effect on revising not in drafting.In other words,the effects of audience awareness on discourse coherence of non-English majors in drafting are less effective than that in revising.Based on these findings,the study has some suggestions both on future English writing teaching and English writing learning.These implications are that: 1)Teachers,especially those who teach English writing,can give students some stimulus materials about audience awareness before their writing,or the teachers can raise more questions and talk about more about the stimulus materials in composition instruction class to stimulate students thinking about the audience.2)Teachers should take full advantage of the revising period to guide and inspire the students.3)In writing process,students should pay attention to the audience awareness,and consider his audience at every moment,which can enhance their audience awareness as well as the writing proficiency.Finally,the limitations of this study and the necessity of the further study are provided.