Participant-observer and case study research designs were used during the course of a 17-month-long study that sought (1) to determine the influence of sense of audience on the writing processes of eight adolescent boys and (2) to develop and explore effective research procedures that might provide insights into the writing processes and emphasize the potential relationship between good teaching and research. The case studies revealed that audience awareness had the effect of directing the subjects' dependence away from an individually devised, inconsistent, and confusing "trusted strategem," to a willingness to learn conventional strategies. In addition, it influenced the writers to draw on their expressive language, encouraged them to interrelate the entire range of language functions, enhanced the fluency of writing to facilitate a sense of two-way language convergence that paralleled the subjects' oral language situations, fostered the subjects' individual interests in extending their language use, and promoted and strengthened the interrelationships between the expressive language function and content incorporation. Another important discovery was that none of the boys construed their respective teachers as being genuine readers or real people with whom they were making contact through writing. (HOD)