In this study, we investigated audience awareness characteristics in elementary school students’ texts. To achieve this goal, we used a cross-sectional study design and sampled texts from 90 students in grades 1–3 (N = 270). These texts formed a corpus that was qualitatively analyzed by the research team. We used descriptive statistics to identify audience awareness patterns. Based on previous research, we expected to find considerable variation within and between grades. Therefore, we posed the following two research questions: (1) What characterizes audience awareness within grades 1–3? and (2) How does audience awareness develop between grades 1–3? We found that students used various rhetorical moves oriented toward the audience, such as greetings and closings, meta-text, explanations, and justifications. The results indicated that the students exhibited several characteristics related to audience awareness in all three grades. However, the variation within the grades was significant, while the variation between the grades was less pronounced.

[Open Access CC BY-NC-ND]This article addresses the basis for the development of the screening tool Norwegian Early Writers Signal (NEWS). The aim of the study was to develop a tool for teachers in grades 1–3 to identify student texts in ‘the Warning Zone’, i.e., texts that signal insufficient overall text quality associated with students in need of extra instructional support. Text norms were elicited from a panel of 14 experts in a standardsetting seminar. The standard-setting procedure was a benchmarking-like approach in which panelists chose texts that according to their judgement were in the Warning Zone. Additionally, in an online questionnaire, data on experts’ expectation growth pattern for eight text quality aspects in grades 1–3 were collected. Furthermore, student texts in the Warning Zone were marked and then included in the screening tool to concretize the norms, showing that texts in this zone can take several shapes. The article discusses what steps can be taken to further validate and implement the NEWS tool.