Rhetorical Analysis Tasks to Develop Audience Awareness in Thesis Writing

Abstract

A series of online workshops was held to investigate the contributions of rhetorical analysis tasks on ten postgraduate student writers’ sense of audience in thesis writing. During the rhetorical analysis tasks, the students’ thesis drafts were analyzed by their supervisors before and after participating in the workshops. In addition, the students were interviewed at the end to gain insights of their understanding of audience. The findings suggested that adopting rhetorical analysis tasks may improve learners’ sense of audience. The findings also showed that the participants seemed to possess better rhetorical knowledge about appropriate genre, content, stance and style.