A Study On The Effects Of Audience Awareness Cultivation On High School Students’ English Writing Ability

In the current English writing teaching in senior high school,teachers tend to devote themselves to training students’ writing skills and techniques for the sole purpose of achieving high scores.They concentrate on instructing “what” and “how”,instead of “who” or “why” in English writing teaching,which leads to students’ vague writing orientation,weak motivation,and poor performance in their English writing.It is demonstrated in relative studies that integrating the audience awareness cultivation with English writing teaching will be the key to break away from the difficult position and improve the writing performance of senior high school students.Supported by Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory and Paulo Freire’s Dialogue Theory,this study aims to cultivate students’ audience awareness in their English writing and explore its feasibility and effectiveness on improving their English writing ability.The research questions to be answered include: 1)What effects does audience awareness cultivation have on high school students’ English writing interest? 2)What effects does audience awareness cultivation have on high school students’ English writing strategy? 3)What effects does audience awareness cultivation have on high school students’ English writing performance?The author selects two parallel classes as the participants from Grade One of a senior high school in Dalian to carry out a one-semester writing teaching experiment.During the experiment,the Experimental Class(EC)adopts the mode of audience awareness cultivation,while the Control Class(CC)adopts the traditional teaching method.The research instruments,including questionnaires,pre-test,post-test and interview,are employed in these two classes,and then the data is collected and analyzed with the aid of SPSS 25.0.The research findings indicate that: firstly,audience awareness cultivation significantly enhances students’ writing interest,which can be a rich source of inspiration for their compositions;in addition,audience awareness cultivation effectively improves students’ writing strategy,so that they are able to use appropriate writing strategies accordingly,involving cognitive strategy,meta-cognitive strategy and social-affective strategy;lastly,compared with the Control Class(CC),students’ writing scores in Experimental Class(EC)have been remarkably increased after the experiment.This study affords the successful lessons that merit attention for senior high school English writing teaching: teachers are supposed to make conscious efforts to cultivate students’ audience awareness in their writing,rather than being subject to the mechanical drills of writing outcomes and techniques.However,this study fails to take some variables into consideration,such as different characters,abilities,and cognitive styles among the students,which has produced little effects on the result of research.Therefore,it is expected that theses problems are improved and solved in future research.