Because most adult students learning English by correspondence never meet their tutors, a study was conducted in which students were asked to send in tape recordings of some experience in their lives. As in the impersonal and rather sterile situation of correspondence study, the students were talking to a listener they could not visualize so that the general problem of audience was magnified. It was therefore hypothesized that since the speakers did not know who they were talking to, they would turn back to themselves as the audience. Analysis of four monologue tapes showed that two of the students did turn back to themselves as audience. When talking about their experiences, they adopted the role of onlooker or spectator. The other two students' tapes revealed a retreat to formality and awkward phrasing. Whereas an unknown audience constrained the speech and limited the range of subjects for the latter two students, the adaptation to self as audience freed the other two students to speak fluently and openly about their experiences. (HOD)