Blogging and Audience Aeness

Awareness of audience is a difficult concept for young writers to embrace. However, Weblogs or blogging may foreground the needs of the audience for a given written work, and provide novice authors the tools to obtain and make use of audience feedback, and subsequently, grow as writers who are aware of their audience. The article presents a case study conducted in a second-grade classroom for the purpose of comparing students' growing awareness of audience and the ways in which their written work addressed the needs of the audience. Methods used included analysis of student written work, student comments to peers on blog posts, and survey data. Findings show that student writers were able to improve their writing based on the near-immediate feedback provided by their peers; students were able to provide substantive feedback on the work of others; and students were motivated to revise their work based on the feedback they received via blog comments.