Teachers’ Perceptions of Mitigation in Supervisory Discourse: a report of a pilot study

The purpose of this study was to determine whether teachers discriminate between three types of supervisory communication in post‐observation supervisory conferences. The conferences differed in the way in which they were mitigated: the first had high linguistic mitigation at the utterance level; the second was unmitigated; the third was unmitigated at the utterance level, but was mitigated above the utterance. The overall purpose was to seek corroboration, through experimental means, of conclusions drawn from a descriptive study of supervisory discourse which found pervasive evidence of mitigation in supervisory discourse addressed to the ‘face’ needs of the supervisee. This article reports a pilot study carried out to test the instruments (video and questionnaire) and to seek preliminary corroboration. The objective was to see whether teachers discriminate as hypothesised and to see what by‐products are produced by mitigation. The dependent variables were clarity, supportiveness, authority, gravity and productivity. The intended implication of the study is that strategic training for supervisors could relieve them of the social‐skills burden which they face, and therefore sidestep the need for excessive utterance‐level mitigation.