Audience awareness and its role in Chinese engineering doctoral students’ L2 English academic writing

Abstract

The social view of writing accentuates the interpersonal dimensions in academic written discourse. Writers are considered to socially engage readers and negotiate social relations with them in various ways in the act of writing. Therefore, writers' choices of textual representations are essentially mediated by who they construct as audience, and the features of the perceived readership. Given the crucial role of writers' awareness of audience in shaping the writing product, this study examines who two doctoral engineering students constructed as their intended readers in their L2 English academic writing of various genres and the textual features mediated by their perceptions of audience. Drawing on multiple sources of data, including academic writing of various genres and three to four rounds of interviews, the study demonstrated that the participants both took reviewers and readers from the general field into concern as audiences; however, some variation in audience construction was also observed between the participants. Further, the study found that the participants’ audience awareness mediated strategic and purposeful orchestrations of textual features, such as topic selection, wording, and multimodal presentation of information. Implications concerning doctoral academic writing training are discussed.