Abstract:

Being physically absent from the writing process, the reader has to be activated through a mental representation that supports the writer’s decision-making during text production. The ability to activate audience awareness has been associated with expert writers. The literature on this subject points to pupils’ difficulty in activating the reader's perspective. However, we may ask how this ability emerges over the course of learning to write.
The ability to activate the readers’ perspective in order to make decisions concerning the text is an indicator that has been associated with the development of writing skills. Expert and professional writers show this capacity, while novice or non-expert writers find it difficult to construct a representation of the readers and to activate it while writing. One difficult aspect of the activation of the reader's perspective derives from the indefinite or indeterminate nature of the reader, during the time of text production, for most texts. Hence, the writer often takes his or her own knowledge as a reference and this may result in a writer-centred text, one that is not focused on the effects to be achieved on the reader.

The activation of the reader's perspective during the process of text production must occur in combination with the other demands of writing, namely content generation, language production and text structure. The co-occurrence of these demands negatively affects the activation of the reader's perspective, which emerges only sparingly during the writing process of primary pupils.

This study analysed the manifestations of audience awareness in primary school pupils. It focused on the corpus of pupils’ reflections on their writing process. The analysis identified the explicit references to the reader's perspective in the corpus. The results confirmed the scarcity of such references, but also identified some areas (namely formal aspects) in which pupils’ audience awareness emerges. The results of this study, based on the analysis of pupils’ reflection on the activity of writing, revealed some domains where direct references to reader emerged. These occurrences point to the possibility of extending and promoting this capacity.

Knowledge about the areas for which the activation of the readers’ perspective already occurs in the text production of some students may, in a natural way, guide those teaching processes that are intended to promote audience awareness and the ability to activate it during the writing process. Some approaches, like reflection on decision-making in the writing task or interaction with collaborators (who will be the first readers of the text, besides the author), can be implemented in different ways to foster the development of audience awareness and its activation during the process of text production.

Keywords:

Writing, Consciousness, Metacognitive knowledge, Audience awareness, Reader.