An Experimental Study Of Audience Awareness In Senior School English Letter Writing

The importance of English writing depends on not only the requirement of modern society, but also the role it plays in the four English skills—listening, speaking, reading, and writing. However, "Improving writing ability is always a great difficulty for Chinese students and it is also a weak link in today's English teaching."(Sun Li: 2003). As a result, English teachers and learners should pay special attention to English writing. English letter writing is an important part of English writing. For senior students, it is not only a need of communication with others in their social life, but also an important tool for The New Curriculum Criterion in Senior Middle School to test students' abilities of English application and communication. The author of this thesis did two surveys of the writing tasks for the last ten years in the National Matriculation English Test (NMET for short as follows). The first one is a survey of the writing tasks in the NMET from 1999 to 2004. It is found that letter writing takes up the most part of it, occupying 6 in the 10 years. Especially during the recent 4 years, that is, from 2001 to 2004, all the compositions are the types of letter writing. The second one is a survey of the writing tasks in different provinces and direct-jurisdiction cities in the 2005 NMET. It is amazing to find that in the 28 surveyed provinces and direct-jurisdiction cities in China, there are 19 whose compositions are writing letters, which definitely shows the importance of English letter writing to senior students.There are numerous factors which influence students' ability ofwriting and letter writing. After a questionnaire the author found the lack of audience awareness is one of the important factors. Besides, audience is one of the important elements relating to a writing procedure (Raimes, 1983). It is also one of the four basic factors in the writing transmission system. They are: the subject (the writer);the receptor (the readers);the object (the object) and vehicle (the article) (Liu Haitao, 2002). Moreover, each letter has a clearly given reader and should have a higher request of audience awareness. As a result, the present study focused on students'audience awareness in English letter writing and was aimed at developing senior students' audience awareness in English letter writing and improving their letter writing ability at the same time.This study follows the theories of Cooperative Principle, Reception Aesthetics, and Politeness Principle and experimental study is dominant in it and surveys and questionnaires serve as important supplements. The author randomly chose two senior two classes (Class.315 and Class.316) from No.l Middle School in Liu Yang, where the author is currently working. Class.316 was the experimental class and Class.315 was the control class and in total there were 106 students taking part in it, with each class 53.The experiment lasted for a term of 20 weeks. It elaborates the purpose, the selection of participants, the arrangement, the strategies and the detailed process of the experiment. The data comparison and analyses between the pretest and the posttest result in some findings: Firstly, the students have got a higher level of awareness or consciousness of the audience when they are writing English letters. Secondly, the students have made much progress in their English letter writing skills after the experiment. Thirdly, the students' interests in English learning have been motivated and much developed. The students have obviously become willing to write and are more active in writing lessons. Besides the above findings, the author wrote two articles about the study: "the Development of Audience Awareness " and "Concerns on English Letter Writing in the NMET". The former was published in the English Weekly (senior Teachers' Edition) on April 23rd, 2005 and the latter in the Student Times (Teachers 'Edition) on August 13, 2005.This thesis consists of five chapters besides the introduction and the conclusion. Chapter one states the significance of English writing and English letter writing for senior students. Chapter two explains the definition of audience awareness and its request in English letter writing. Chapter three introduces some correlative theoretical foundations. Chapter four gives a detailed instruction about the experiment. Chapter five is about the data analysis and the findings. Meanwhile the author points out some limitations in this study and puts forward some plans and suggestions for further study.