Responding to Audience: Using Rubrics to Teach and Assess Writing

key element in the shift toward teaching critical literacy in the English classroom is helping students to develop a deeper, sense of the rhetorical nature of language and to use written language effectively In order to do this, students must have a keen sense of audience. One approach to developing this sense is to have them work with peer review groups. Too often, however, they merely go through the motions of the peer editing process and do not develop the sense of audience that the exercise is intended to foster. Furthermore, since the final assessment of student papers usually rests upon the teacher, many times students end up largely writing for an audience of one, the teacher. In working collaboratively to create the Memoir Writing Project, we developed a two-fold assessment system which encourages students to learn more about the role of audience in shaping a text. By teaching students how to use the objective responses of peers to judge the effectiveness of their writing and by using grading rubrics that emphasize audience response in the process of teaching and assessing student writing, teachers can authentically teach students about the role of audience.