Korean Graduate Students’ Audiences for Their English Academic Writing

The present study investigated first-year graduate students’ considerations of audience for their English academic writing and their attempts to accommodate the audience expectations. Eight first-year master’s students in English education were interviewed based on their English academic papers before and after an on-line discussion conducted to raise the writers’ awareness of audience. Three thematic domains emerged from the data: (a) audience determinateness, (b) the writer’s positioning in relation to audience, and (c) audience specification. Under the first domain, three different types of audience including the professor-evaluator as a real reader, audience as an extended self-projection, and textually implied audience were identified. Each type of audience was suggested to influence the different, hierarchical levels of writing. The second domain included two categories: (a) authoritative audience versus friendly/uninformed audience and (b) audience as addressee versus audience as beneficiary. The writers’ posited relationships with audiences were suggested to establish differential motivations for writing. The third domain represented the degrees to which the writers have specified representations of audience. Broad and vague idea on audience could result in limited information and simplistic arguments in the text. Based on the study findings and discussions, pedagogical implications are provided.