Dear Antonio,

That's an interesting question. We encourage our students to view their academic writing as a social process. This is manifested in two main ways:

• Public goal setting - telling a peer or your supervisor what you intend to do has a strong social motivation - the paper we cite for this is Hayes, S. C., Rosenfarb, I., Wulfert, E., Munt, E. D., Korn, Z. and Zettle, R. D. (1985) Self-reinforcement effects: an artifact of social standard setting, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 18(3), pp. 201-214.
• The PowerPoint technique (my name/invention), where we encourage students to pretend that they are giving a PowerPoint presentation on their writing to a group of their peers. There are allowed a few slides with headings and bullet points. Both the slide headings and the bullet points within them should follow a logical sequence. If you divide up the word count with about 125 words per bullet point then the points can become the main ideas or topics of your paragraphs and the paragraphs should also flow in a logical sequence. Some students say this really helps them to think about their writing in a social context and to clarify their paragraph writing and argumentation.

I hope this is helpful!

Dear Antonio,

That's an interesting question. We encourage our students to view their academic writing as a social process. This is manifested in two main ways:

• Public goal setting - telling a peer or your supervisor what you intend to do has a strong social motivation - the paper we cite for this is Hayes, S. C., Rosenfarb, I., Wulfert, E., Munt, E. D., Korn, Z. and Zettle, R. D. (1985) Self-reinforcement effects: an artifact of social standard setting, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 18(3), pp. 201-214.
• The PowerPoint technique (my name/invention), where we encourage students to pretend that they are giving a PowerPoint presentation on their writing to a group of their peers. There are allowed a few slides with headings and bullet points. Both the slide headings and the bullet points within them should follow a logical sequence. If you divide up the word count with about 125 words per bullet point then the points can become the main ideas or topics of your paragraphs and the paragraphs should also flow in a logical sequence. Some students say this really helps them to think about their writing in a social context and to clarify their paragraph writing and argumentation.

I hope this is helpful!

Antonio:

I can also attest to students paying more attention to their work once it's for public viewing. I think the idea that their work would come under heavy scrutiny from the public causes them to do better, which as educators we all want. Here's an article that may help to explain the phenomenon:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280916244_Composing_in_Public

Article Composing in Public

i agree with Dr Debra

Reading and writing in authentic situation has been shown to improve the quality of products students produce in a large array of literature.  Authentic audience is a huge component...  Here are two terrific articles on this point:

Duke, N. K., Purcell-Gates, V., Hall, L. A., & Tower, C. (2006). Authentic literacy activities for developing comprehension and writing. Reading Teacher, 60(4), 344.

Magnifico, A. M. (2010). Writing for whom? Cognition, motivation, and a writer's audience. Educational Psychologist, 45(3), 167-184.

Thank you so much Peter, Debra, Martina, and Kimberly. Your suggestions are very helpful. I was indeed looking for references, and yours seem to be very inspiring. They also helped me look into other directions. I was concentrating mainly on communication and the performing arts, but now, with your help, I’ve broadened my horizons to self-reinforcement and behavior analysis, literacy studies, peer reviewing, authentic learning, and a number of other lines of inquiry that your suggestions stirred up.

Hi Antonio;

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life was published in 1959, by Erving Goffman (sociologist). In this book he uses the imagery of theater in order to depict the significance of human and social action and interaction. He refers to this as the “dramaturgical model of social life.” Goffman states that social interaction may be equated to a theater, and people in daily life as actors on a stage, each playing an array of characters. The audience comprises of separate persons who perceive the role-playing and respond to the enactments. In social interaction, like in theatrical performances, there is a front region where the actors are on stage in front of an audience. There is also a back region, or back stage, where individuals can be themselves and disregard the role or identity that they portray when they are in front of others.

Camille Wright Miller, (trainer, consultant, and author), has noted that many leaders have the ability to “mirror” behaviors of persons they communicate with. The term mirroring is used to describe a situation where one person deliberately accords the body language of the person in which he/she is encountered with. Mirroring is based on the premise that one is most likely to develop a kinship with those who are like their selves. In many cases, subtle shifts in how one presents self can increase the comfort level of the other person. Impressions of people are formed by witnessing their behavior and by paying even closer attention to the speech patterns and gestures of the person we are talking to.

I hope this helps!

~~ Pastor Debbie

Thank you for your question Antonio. The presence of an audience gives weight to the learning experience. This can be observed in simulations in which a presenter, learning the speech or debate style, presents before a mock-up of the real audience. Comparing the outcome of the simulation, to just practicing before a mirror, shows that the learner-presenter benefits tremendously from an audience influence.. The same is apparent in asynchronous online learning, when groups of students meet to discuss. When the student is the only member of the class, the learning is minimal. However, a group of students engaged in online discussion enriches the depth of understanding of each member of the group. According to L. Dee Fink, the scenario gives birth to a form of team based learning, in which some internalized reflective dialogue takes place. (Fink, 2013)

Reference

Fink, L. D. (2013). Creating significant learning experiences: An integrated approach to designing college courses. John Wiley & Sons.

Thank you very much, Pastor Debbie,

It does help, indeed. The insight about Ervin Goffman, which brings to mind, in addition, the ideas of some symbolic interactionists, was very inspiring. The mirroring dimension also brought to my mind a lovely book I read some twenty years ago, “Simplicity and Complexity in Games of the Intellect”, by Lawrence Slobodkin, which explores, amongst other things, the issues of self-image and the closeness between “playing” in theatre and “playing” in games.

Antonio

Thank you, Temitope,

for pointing out Fink’s book, which I’ll try to order for our library. The experiments you mention come very close to my interests.

Antonio

Dear Antonio,

In the field of sociolinguistics, in 1984, Allan Bell presented the so-called Audience Design model. This model, based on research on communication of dj's with their radio audience in New Zealand, shows that the audience consists of several groups:

1. addressees, who are are known by the one who sends the information, are ratified as members of the group, and are directly addressed to (known by name, for instance). In my case (missionary linguistics of 18th century Dutch Creole) these are the ones who are closest to the missionaries, i.e. teachers.

2. auditors, who are listeners who are not directly addressed, but are known and ratified. In my case these are the members of the religious community, christianized slaves, but also missionaries who are present).

3. overhearers, who are the non-ratified listeners of whom the speaker is aware. In my case planters and slaves from outside of the community. The speaker can use elements form different jargons or can use explanations in another language to connect to them.

4. eavesdroppers, who are non-ratified listeners of whom the speaker is unaware. These are not present, but may play an important role, such as people of the government. A speaker can connect to the government by not using offensive subjects.

5. referees, who form the basis, the tradition for the message the speaker uses. In my case the missionary translators use terms, references and formulas which are not of any use for his addressees nor his auditors, and which should be accompanied by explanations, but are present to connect to the original tradition.

In case of presentations, this model is good to use. To whom does the presenter focus? Does he use the language/norms of the group, or does he want to please someone else? Does he use a format already present by tradition?

I really hope this can be of any help!

Bell, A. (1984) Language Style as Audience Design. In Coupland, N. and A. Jaworski (1997, eds.) Sociolinguistics: a Reader and Coursebook, pp. 240-50. New York: St Mattin's Press Inc.

A short search on the Internet will provide you several good examples and descriptions!

Dear Antonio, presenting assignments to a public is always a very stressful moment for everyone, both adults and children. The majority of people are afraid of making a speech, for example. Giving public performance mobilizes students' energy because they want to show the best outcome as they can, to be approved by the audience. Perhaps it's some atavism of frustration which a man felt when he/she was expelled from the tribe for misdead in the ancient times.

This could be interesting to you either:

https://docviewer.yandex.ru/r.xml?sk=6e540c103231fa92dea0fc55f3f4fed3&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.plh.manchester.ac.uk%2Fdocuments%2FPerformance%2C%2520Learning%2520%26%2520Heritage%2520-%2520Report.pdf

http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/what-role-audience-performance-392104

Hello

it could provide them with the relevant '' point of reference'' and ''anchor'' to be able to make the necessary associations and comparisons for effective performance.

Olá/Hello António

What an interesting observation and research question!

It reminded me of an international project I read about some time ago, within the mathematics education research field, that was coordinated by George Gadanidis and Marcelo Borba. The research team developed a theoretical framework for approaching what they termed as "digital mathematical performance". 

Here is their website: http://www.edu.uwo.ca/dmp/, and here is one of the seminal papers they presented: http://www.editlib.org/p/22679/proceeding_22679.pdf.

Cumprimentos/Best wishes

Hélia