Page 103 - SREENARAYANAGURU OPEN UNIVERSITY

• What are their needs? or it can be a large public audience. An import-
ant feature of the audience in public speaking
Now what are the benefits of understanding situations is the unequal distribution of speak-
the audience? When you are speaking you want ing time. The speaker here talks a lot and the
the listeners to understand and respond favour- audience listen, often without asking questions
ably to what you are saying. An audience is or responding with any feedback. On some
a group of people who assemble together to occasions the audience may ask questions or
listen to the speaker. The audience can com- respond to the speaker by making comments.
municate face to face with the speaker or they
can be connected by the information technol- Based on the nature of the audience, they can
ogy through computers, cell phones or other be classified in to four types. They are:
media. The size of the audience may be small

Fig 3.1.6 Types of audience

(1) Hostile Audience during the speech
f Use plenty of references and facts
This audience does not like listening to you. to support your points
This could be due to many reasons, from disin- f Work hard on developing trust
terest in the organisation you are representing, and interest of the audience
to wishing to get home and watch their favou- (2) Critical Audience
rite programme on television. The indifference
of the audience can overcome by the following This kind of audience can be seen at techni-
strategies, cal conferences or meetings and they become
critical because they would be keen on proving
f Use humour or exposing mistakes in your points.
f Engage them by asking questions

SGOU - FYUGP - SLM - English for Communication 97