Identify and analyse the ways texts construct intended audiences and reading positions, including how readers can accept, negotiate or resist these positions

What this dot point is asking

QCAA wants Year 11 students to identify how texts construct intended audiences and reading positions, and to recognise that readers can accept, negotiate or resist these positions.

Intended audience vs actual audience

Intended audience. The audience the writer or publisher had in mind. Inferred from genre, vocabulary, references, assumed knowledge.

Actual audience. Anyone who reads the text. Can include readers far removed from the intended audience by time, culture, age or political position.

A 19th-century imperial adventure novel had a specific intended audience (white European boys); its actual audience now includes scholars critiquing imperialism. Meaning differs across audiences.

Implied reader

The reader the text constructs through its choices. Often broader than the explicit intended audience; the implied reader is the figure the text addresses.

A text may explicitly address one audience and implicitly invite a wider one. Picture books address children but include knowing humour for parent-readers.

Reading positions

Stuart Hall's encoding/decoding model (1973) distinguishes three reading positions:

Dominant (hegemonic). Reader accepts the text's intended meaning. Reads "with the grain".

Negotiated. Reader accepts the broad framework but contests particular elements. Mixed acceptance.

Resistant (oppositional). Reader rejects the text's preferred meaning, often by exposing its ideological assumptions.

All three are legitimate critical positions, not just decoding errors.

How texts position readers

• Direct address ("you", "we").
• Shared assumptions ("we all know that").
• Authority signals (expert sources, statistics, formal register).
• Emotional appeal (personal stories, vivid imagery).
• Aesthetic conventions (genre expectations, beauty).
• Visual and multimodal cues (smiling photographs, calm colours).

Resistant reading practice

To construct a resistant reading:

1. Identify the text's preferred meaning and the position it invites readers to take.
2. Identify the ideological assumptions that make this position seem natural.
3. Pose a counter-position from a different cultural, political, gendered or historical standpoint.
4. Use textual evidence to support the counter-reading.

Resistant readings are most powerful when they engage the text closely, not when they simply dismiss it.

Worked example

The Australian Tourism Commission ad for visiting the outback positions the reader as an adventurous urban professional ready to "find themselves" in pristine wilderness. A resistant reading from an Indigenous standpoint exposes the assumption of empty land available for tourist consumption, the invisibility of First Nations sovereignty, and the romanticisation of country that is also home.

Common traps

Treating resistant readings as misreadings. All three positions are legitimate critical postures.

Confusing the implied reader with the actual reader. Different categories.

Forgetting that audience analysis requires textual evidence. Like all analysis, claims about audience need quoted support.

In one sentence

Texts construct intended audiences and reading positions through direct address, shared assumptions, authority signals and aesthetic conventions; Stuart Hall distinguishes dominant (accepting), negotiated (mixed) and resistant (oppositional) reading positions, all of which are legitimate critical postures grounded in textual evidence and reader standpoint.