The Effect of Distant Audiences on Students’ Writing

Abstract

Audience considerations play an important role in the development of text by experienced writers but are often nonexistent in the writing of school-age children. The lack of audience awareness found in school writing may index the slow development of the social-cognitive skills necessary to conceptualize different audiences or it may result from the decontextual approach to writing that is prevalent in classrooms. This study examined the quality of students’ writing in two audience conditions: to their teacher for a term assessment and to a distant peer audience to share ideas. Seventh-grade students wrote two compositions on the same topic, one addressed to peers in other countries via a computer network and the other to their teacher for their semester grade, counterbalanced for order effects. In both conditions, there was significantly higher ratings of the papers written to communicate with peers than those written to demonstrate skill in writing. The findings suggest that the development of functional writing environments to contextualize students’ work can lead to improvements in the quality of students’ classroom writing.

Telecommunication in the Classroom: Rhetoric versus Reality

“…Since the trend to use e-mail exchanges in classrooms is a relatively new one, comprehen sive, large-scale studies have not yet been conducted. Of the small number of relevant or related studies that have been conducted (e.g., Cohen & Riel, 1989;Cole, 1996;Cooper & Selfe, l99O;Gallini&Helman, 1995;Garner &Gillingham, ing Network, for example, coordinates classroom "learning circles" composed of six to eight classrooms and geared for Grade 3-12 (see Cahall, 1994;D¡mitriadis & Kamberelis, 1997;Donath, 1995;Gallini & Helman, 1995;Riel, 1992Riel, , 1995Spaulding & Lake, 1991). Launched in 1996 with "a $150 million commitment to help connect schools, libraries, and communities to the Information Super highway" (Welcome, 1997), the AT&T Learning Network structures classroom collaboration around a curriculum area such as geography, social studies, or English.…”

Engaging students in computational modeling: The role of an external audience in shaping conceptual learning, model quality, and classroom discourse

“…Although imagined audiences have been found to increase the quality of students’ writing, interacting with a real audience during revision has been demonstrated to produce higher quality writing than an imagined audience (Cohen & Riel, ; McCutchen, ; Wang, ). Therefore, in our designed learning activities, we included opportunities for students in the external‐audience condition to interact with 5th grade students.…”

How First-year Students Expressed Their Transition to College Experiences Differently Depending on the Affordances of Two Writing Contexts

“…Literacy theorists in the 1980s singled out the importance of audience (Flower, 1979; Ong, 1975) and argued convincingly that writing is always directed from the writer to an imagined reader and that writers address different others in different ways (Bakhtin, 1986; Black, 1989; Bazerman, 2004; Cohen & Riel, 1989; Ede, 1989; Freedman, 1994). Simultaneously, a parallel line of research explored the impact of the then new writing medium, the word-processor, on the way that narrators thought and wrote (Collier, 1983; Daiute, 1983, 1985; Daiute & Kruidenier, 1985; Scardamalia, Bereiter, McLean, Swallow, & Woodruff, 1989; Schwartz, 1982).…”

“…Given the wide array of available tools for writing, and the importance of audience, much work is needed to explore how students use the interactive features of rapidly advancing writing technology. Informed by theory on writing and audience, which indicated audience influences the way narrators write, think, and make sense of their worlds (Bakhtin, 1986; Black, 1989; Cohen & Riel, 1989; Daiute, 2010; Lucic, 2013), the current work presents a quasi-experimental study of how the interactive features of two writing contexts influenced students’ expressive writing in their first six months of college.…”