Teaching and Learning Writing with Audience Awareness in the English Classroom

Being part of general literacy skills, writing skills and audience awareness are essential for learning and communication in higher education, work life and participation in society. One approach in particular, threshold concepts for writing, has recently received increased attention for its potential to promote audience awareness in writing. Answering Costa and Albergaria-Almeida’s (2015) call to review teaching practices to meet the European standards and given the lack of research on threshold pedagogy for writing in Swedish school settings, the present study illuminates what beliefs and practices upper-secondary English teachers report regarding teaching audience awareness in writing, and how upper-secondary students learning English speak about audience awareness and their writing strategies. This qualitative ethnographic study involved email and stimulated recall interviews with four English teachers and nine students. The teacher and student datasets were analysed, coded, and organised into themes using content analysis. The findings indicate that teachers consider audience awareness in teaching and learning writing important and report using genre pedagogy to model the students’ writing process. However, the teachers differed regarding how much emphasis they put on audience when teaching and assessing writing. Moreover, the students reported reflecting on the audience and their writing to varying degrees, yet only a few students chose and wrote to a particular target audience aside from their teachers. Ultimately, the findings of this study suggest that supplementing genre pedagogy with Adler-Kassner and Wardle’s (2016b) threshold writing concepts can yield several benefits: to help teachers collaborate and communicate about their beliefs and students’ struggles, adopting threshold concepts and audience as a shared metalanguage; to create informed explicit writing instruction and assessment that target students’ metacognitive understanding of the needs of an