ABSOLUT ENGLISH
AUDIENCE/CONTEXT/GENRE
To say the truth, this topic is still very new to me, because I have started thinking about it since last week�fs classes. I feel I had been ignoring to whom and why students are writing. This might not be my complete view of the topic, but here is how I would like to approach it when I teach writing in my classroom.
Audience:
I completely agree with what best practices say about this: Students need real audience. In my experiences in writing, I had always been writing for my teachers. I needed to do so, because I had to earn grades from them. It was just a common sense to myself that I was writing to my teachers. But I learned that having real audience for students in their writings is very effective to motivate them to write and to show them how they can really affect other people with their writings. As Susan and Stephen Tchudi say in their book The English language Arts Handbook, �gThey (Students) can have a positive impact on the world through community-based writing.�h For example, it would be nice to have community, parents, celebrity, friends, and so on as the audience in their writings.
Context:
As our instructor, Jon Bush, says, �gThere is no such thing as �egood writing�f.�h I strongly believe in his words, because I understand that writing is very complex. It is very true that without giving students �gsituations�h (or even letting students come up with some �gsituations�h by themselves), there is no way to evaluate them in writing. Even if one�fs grammar was perfect in the writing, it might not fit the situation of a topic. For example, you might not want to write a short story for kindergarten children with complicated plot and vocabulary in full ten pages.
Genre:
If I was on a right track of understanding what Audience/Context/Genre in writing mean, it is natural to think that they are strongly related to each other. Genre is very important to audience and context of writings, and it refers to the type of writing. As I learned in class last week, every audience or context involves with a specific genre, and it is our job to help students find the most appropriate genre in their writings. For example, when you are asking someone to go out with you, you might want to use nice words rather than to use bad words to the person. Whether the audience is your teacher or your friends will bring a completely different genre of writing as well as whether the context is for your research paper or for your shopping list does the same.
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Absolut English: Audience/Context/Genre (11/17/01)