The Cultivation Of Audience Awareness In College-English Writing Instruction

Audience awareness means that the writer realizes the potential reader in his/her writing and consciously builds up a relationship by using corresponding schematic structures. In other words, the writer thinks about who will read his/her paper before and while he/she writes, and adjusts the paper to help his/her reader understand it. Audience awareness is much crucial for writers because the key that separates good writing from bad is a sense of audience (Jack Rawlins, 1999). Moffet directly and forcefully announced the need for greater attention to audience in composition studies: "If anybody is going to do anything about the teaching of writing, the first priority is going to have to be the rekindling of the sense of audience. Until that's done, nothing else is going to happen"(Squire Moffet 1977:298). McAlexander (1996) also pointed out, one of the most important aspects of good writing is a concern for readers' reactions, and college English writing instruction should focus on techniques to strengthen audience awareness. Researches on writing also reveal the importance of audience-awareness approach in college English writing instruction (Carvalho 2002).However, the author of this paper has found in her English writing teaching practice that most college students rarely consider audience's needs and adjust their compositions to help audience understand in writing. Some of her colleagues also complain about the flatness of content, lack of communicative purpose and so on in their students' writings. Carvalho says audience awareness is one of the most crucial aspects of learning to write well, and one of the easiest to be overlooked (Carvalho 2002). Can the lack of audience awareness lead to the .problems above? With interests, the author of this paper discusses the instruction of college students' English writing with special attention to the aspect of the audience. The discussion focuses on the two following questions:Q1. How should audience awareness affect Chinese college students' English writing?Q2. How to cultivate the college students' awareness of the reader/audience in English writing instruction without neglecting the assignments contained within the teaching syllabus and without affecting regular teaching performance?At the end of this paper, an experiment was designed to test if awareness of audience in writing has a positive effect on students' performance in writing. The answer is positive. The results of the experiment show that the students who are trained to write with an audience in mind have better performance than those without. The results of the questionnaire suggest that students prefer the use of audience-orientated model in writing.