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

Abstract

 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
• Audience engagement, EFL
• EFL; Persian
• Persian, training, writing instruction
• training
• writing instruction