Mitigation in instructor feedback: A register analysis of written and spoken comments

Register is among the most important predictors of linguistic variation. In a register such as instructor feedback, linguistic features have particularly high stakes, as they can make feedback more clear, detailed, and/or (de)motivating. Mitigation strategies (i.e., the use of hedges and other softeners) are frequently found in instructor feedback and are particularly influential in terms of the feedback's effectiveness. This study compares the patterns of mitigation strategies used in written and spoken feedback to gain insights into register variation. Written comments (provided electronically) and spoken comments (provided through screencast feedback, in which instructors share verbal feedback along with a screenshare of the student's essay) in the Writing Feedback Corpus (WFC) were analyzed. 1,568 comments across these registers were manually coded for mitigation within head acts (core speech acts) and external modification in the surrounding discourse. Strategies were compared quantitatively using key feature analysis (Egbert & Biber, 2023). The findings indicate that feedback registers promote the use of different mitigation strategies and external modification strategies, with written feedback favoring interrogative syntax and unmitigated forms and spoken feedback favoring personal attribution, hedges, and the nursery we as well as the external modifiers minimizer, positive comment, and reason. Implications for providing feedback on student writing are highlighted.