Abstract of

Can First-Grade Writers Demonstrate Audience Awareness?

Julie E. Wollman-Bonilla

Understanding how writers address and invoke audience may simultaneously enhance children's growth as readers and writers. Most research on student writers' sense of audience has focused on secondary and college writers. This study examines first graders' demonstrations of audience awareness in the context of Family Message Journal writing. In Family Message Journals children write a message to their families and receive a written family reply each day. These journals provide a fertile context for the study of audience awareness because of the existence of an authentic, responsive audience for children's messages. Four case-study students' persuasive messages were analyzed for rhetorical moves indicating audience awareness. Textual analysis of children's messages was complemented by analysis of families' replies, observation of classroom instruction, and interviews with teachers, children, and family members. Evidence of audience awareness included the use of Naming, Context, Strategy, and Response Moves. There was growth over the course of the year in children's use of multiple moves within a single message and in their use of relatively sophisticated Response moves. Despite arguments that young children don't have the sociocognitive capacity to imagine or anticipate readers' beliefs and expectations, findings show that these first graders can demonstrate a sense of audience when writing for familiar readers, to get something they want, when prompted by their teacher to attend to audience needs while writing.

Abstract from Wollman-Bonilla, J.E. (2001). Can First-Grade Writers Demonstrate Audience Awareness?. Reading Research Quarterly, 36(2), 184–201. doi: 10.1598/RRQ.36.2.4