Effects of audience awareness on procedural text writing

Abstract

Effects of audience awareness were examined. Some participants acted as writers and the others acted as readers. Writers wrote a text describing a geometrical figure. Readers read the text and tried to draw the figure according to the description. In Exp. 1, audience awareness was manipulated among undergraduate students, 11 men and 34 women. Writers in the high audience-awareness condition spent more time planning and writing texts than writers in the low audience-awareness condition. Texts in the high audience-awareness condition consisted of more letters and sentences with descriptions elaborating the texts. In Exp. 2, prototype texts were constructed based on the results of Exp. 1. Undergraduate students, 11 men and 47 women, who read the prototype text in the high audience-awareness condition could draw the figure more accurately. In Exp. 3, effects of feedback from readers were examined. Ninth-grade students, 22 boys and 34 girls, participated as writers and 7th-grade students, 22 boys and 34 girls, participated as readers. Merely being told to attend to an audience did not improve the quality of texts written by 9th-grade students. However, feedback from the readers who were 7th-grade students was effective. Writers could revise the texts appropriately according to feedback and improve the quality of texts. In addition, the experience of revising the text according to feedback transferred to later writing. Educational implications of the results are discussed.