Audience Awareness

In the article, "Developing Audience Awareness In Writing," Jose´ Brandao Carvalho publishes a study testing a teaching method involving what's called procedural facilitation. Procedural facilitation is designed to help students develop a better sense of audience awareness through focusing on text revision.

In the experiment, which was conducted on both fifth and ninth graders in Portugal, there was an experimental group being taught using procedural facilitation, and a control group which were not taught using the method. Students in the experimental group were asked to "evaluate and to modify the
text they were writing whenever they considered it was necessary" (275).

To measure the effectiveness of the teaching method, Carvalho evaluated both the control and experimental groups by means of a pre-test and post-test. The test results indicated progress in terms of audience awareness in the group that was taught using the procedural facilitation method, and no progress in the group that received no specially designed education.

The results show that procedural facilitation can be an effective teaching strategy that promotes audience awareness, as it "enables the identification of the writers' main difficulties and problems and the definition of the best strategies for tackling them" (281).