The development of a scoring scheme for content in transactional writing: Some indicators of audience awareness¹

1. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 10th International Conference of the Greek Association of Applied Linguistics. Thessaloniki, Greece, December 1991, and at the First International Conference on Language Awareness, University of Wales, Bangor, April 1992.

Abstract

Much importance is given to ‘audience awareness’ in writing research and pedagogy, but there have been few attempts at measuring it. In a study investigating the effects of using the mother‐tongue in the oral preparation for classroom writing in a second language, pupils were asked to explain how to play a game. In the scoring of the writing scripts at the level of content, it soon became clear that whether and how some information should be included was partly dependent on the writer's judgement of the reader. This paper starts by showing how our initial scoring scheme proved inadequate, and describes and explains how we gradually developed a more robust scheme. We present our final scheme, which attempts to take some account of the notion of audience awareness. In the context of this particular writing task, such awareness is seen in terms of whether the writer introduces certain details as new or assumed known information, and how far the writer relies on the reader's pragmatic inference. Finally, we pose some remaining questions for future work in this field.

Notes

1. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 10th International Conference of the Greek Association of Applied Linguistics. Thessaloniki, Greece, December 1991, and at the First International Conference on Language Awareness, University of Wales, Bangor, April 1992.