Through the Eyes of My Reader: A Strategy for Improving Audience Perspective in Children's Descriptive Writing

Abstract The findings in the study suggest "reading-as-the-reader" can improve 5th- and 9th-grade writers' ability to compose descriptive writing consistent with their readers' informational needs. Participants included: 154 writers (78 fifth-graders and 76 ninth-graders) and 52 ninth-grade readers. The study adapted the referential communication design from Traxler and Gernsbacher (1992, 1993) to investigate whether young writers can benefit from a specific perspective-taking condition as they compose and revise their descriptions of tangrams over three separate writing sessions. Three conditions were contrasted: a feedback-only condition, a "rating other" condition, and a "reading-as-the-reader" condition. Readers' correct description-to-tangram matches made for each of three sessions served as the dependent measure. Repeated measures analysis revealed that both the 5th- and the 9th-graders showed consistent significant improvement under the "read-as-the-reader" condition when revising their essays and when drafting anew (F(4,296) = 2.96, p=.019). The results indicate that when young writers engage in a process that mirrors their readers' experiences, they can more accurately revise their descriptive writing to meet their readers' informational needs. A qualitative analysis of the writers' reflection comments completed at the end of the experiment found that reading-as-the-reader was a positive task that enabled students to consider descriptive strategies and the interpretive effect that their descriptions had on their readers. An analysis of the readers' reflections on their experiences revealed that readers were assisted most if the writer included in his or her descriptions a familiar "global" analogy, with additional specific spatial language that describes the internal organization and spatial orientation of the tangram figure.