Abstract
This study explored the audience awareness of 36 fifth-grade students when they composed and revised an original text for two audiences-a good fifth-grade reader and an experienced adult reader-in a realistic transactional writing task. A realistic transactional writing task is one in which the audience addressed by the writer, not an independent rater or a teacher, determines whether the writer has successfully revised the composition to meet the audience's needs and expectations. Fifth-grade and adult readers attempted to identify the target audience in two revisions produced by each writer (72 texts in total). Tests of significance for proportional differences revealed that the fifth graders could successfully revise their texts according to the types of audiences. The fifth graders were more successful in addressing the fifth-grader audience than the adult audience. The expert writers performed better than the novice writers in terms of audience awareness. Finally it was demonstrated that the fifth-grade writers could improve their audience awareness through conferences with the realistic readers.