ABSTRACT
An audience can be defined as the hearers of an utterance and can be singular or plural. Where the audience is plural not all of those who are hearers are necessarily also being addressed: some are merely co-present whilst another is the ‘addressee’ or ‘target’. Reality-confronting communities present a further and contrasting example of audience ambiguity. Those residents in the audience who are apparently merely co-present with the addressee are expected to examine their situation to see whether there are similarities with that of the addressee. In addition to staff and residents providing, and in turn being provided with, redefinitions of each other’s activities, a good deal of importance was attached to staff feeding back to residents an assessment of the residents’ work in the groups. In the period immediately following some of the large groups, for example, staff would retire to staff room to compose a written report that would be read out aloud to residents at next meeting.
