A Survey on the Cultivation of College Students’ Audience Awareness in English Writing

Abstract

The strength of audience awareness has a great influence on the content selection, expression and writing techniques of the article. Therefore, the cultivation of the students’ audience awareness in writing becomes one of the key factors that determine the qualities of the students’ compositions. This thesis conducts a questionnaire and interviews on college students from the four grades of Nanchang Normal University in order to reveal the college students’ cognitive status and attitude of audience awareness. Based on the status quo, this thesis analyzes the possible causes of this situation from two aspects: the teachers’ carelessness on audience awareness and overly concern with writing skills, and the students’ shortage of language ability and logical thinking ability and their excessive attention to writing skills. For these reasons, this thesis proposes corresponding countermeasures: in the English writing class, the reader's awareness should be emphasized; the theme of the article needs to be much closer to life; students are supposed to create imaginary readers in writing; the method of readers' feedback should be fully utilized. The use of these strategies will effectively help college students cultivate audience awareness in English writing.