Audience awareness of Persian learners of English writing: Towards a model of task-oriented strategies

Persian  learners  of  English  often  avoid  attending  to  audience  considerations,  which  brings them  lower  scores.  The  present  study  was  conducted  in  a  major  university  in  Iran  to  help Persian learners develop a sense of audience awareness in writing. Thirty five Persian students of English  were trained  with a focus on process-oriented instruction. The intended task was a letter  where student  writers  were asked to  write to a government authority. Having submitted their  first  drafts,  they  received  training  on  audience  parameters  and  were  asked  to  revise  the drafts  for  style  and  audience  considerations,  and  to  resubmit  the  final  drafts  for  scoring. Participants were interviewed on how they considered the reader in the written text, how they engaged the reader in the text, and what strategies they used for the task accomplishment. The interviews  were  analyzed  qualitatively,  and  transcribed  protocols  were  studied  carefully,  with two  core  categories  (i.e.  linguistic  and  non-linguistic  considerations)  emerging  from  the  data. Also,  participants  implied  attending  to  audience  in  three  phases:  pre-task,  on-the-task,  and post-task  strategies.  In  sum,  training  Persian  learners  resulted  in  their  enhanced  awareness  of strategies they can adopt for audience considerations.

Keywords:

Audience engagement , EFL , Persian , Training , writing instruction