Guess My Audience

This is assignment whose purpose is create an opportunity for students to experiment with strategies for audience adaptation. To give students a chance to feel the discomfort associated with being listeners to a speech that was prepared with an audience different from the actual audience in mind...On the day that you make the assignment ask students to get into pairs or groups of three (you can decide what will work best for your class given the time constraints that you face). Tell the students that you are handing out an assignment that will ask them to develop a brief speech on a particular topic and for a particular audience so that they can practice a full range of audience adaptation strategies...As each group finishes speaking, let the class answer the questions 1) who do you think their audience was supposed to be and 2) what made you think that? Keep the discussion after each speech to a minimum so that all of the speeches can be heard. (More info...)