Audience Awareness

This article concerns the ability or inability of first graders to use the sociocognitive capacity to be aware of their audiences in their writing. A study was done where students would write in a Family Message Journal. In the journal they would write prompts and reactions to stories, and the teacher would not read them. They instead would take them home and a family member would read the message and then respond to it. This is good because the family member was not in the classroom so they do not know what the child is talking about, whereas the teacher does. The goal of the study is to see if first graders can actually be aware of their audience, is this identifiable across the studies and did their awareness grow over the year. The case study took four individuals that represented a group of first graders. The families were asked to respond to the children's writing everyday, even if it was not grammatically correct or even in English. The teacher prompted the children in class to remember the audience, and the families's responses also aided in learning audience awareness. The researcher used codes to pick through the children's journals and see which "moves" they used in their writing. Naming, Context, Strategy, and Response are all moves and codes that the researcher used. When the children were assigned to write a prompted persuasive letter they didn't use as many moves as when writing about a topic they chose themselves. All in all the authors claim was that first graders did in fact have some audience awareness and his study backed up his claim.