The Development of Audience Awareness Through Online Synchronous Teacher-Learner Conference

The teacher-learner writing conference has been researched with a focus on the teacher’s delivery of corrective feedback regarding surface features such as mistakes in grammar and mechanics. The conference took on a unilateral form where the teacher provides feedback and the learner receives it. However, writing is a social act which fundamentally involves a meaning negotiation process between a writer and a reader, and increasingly written communication is taking place in an online environment in both synchronous and asynchronous ways. This qualitative study aimed to investigate how an online collaborative teacher-learner writing conference using a synchronous chat program raises three L2 university learners’ audience awareness and how the awareness is represented in their revisions. Data sources include learners’ reflection journals, chat-logs during the conference, and three writing drafts from each learner. The results indicated that learners showed increased awareness of audience with the process positively affecting their revisions both at macrostructure and microstructure levels. Additionally, certain types of voice as a writer addressing the audience emerged at both levels. The study has research implications for the role of L2 raising audience awareness in developing the L2 writing process and how conference interaction can be effectively promoted through collaborative negotiation. Pedagogical implications are discussed.