ABSTRACT
The focus of Chapter 7 is to draw attention to teaching and learning about linguistic mitigation. In particular, it addresses the importance of teaching language learners about attenuation and increasing their awareness about this communicative strategy. Since mitigation is pervasive in our communication, the chapter underscores the importance of explicit instruction since instruction related to pragmatics and, in particular, mitigation remains underrepresented in curriculum and instructional texts. It presents a brief inventory of ways to introduce mitigating devices, and it provides an example of how to approach instruction. Chapter 7 also discusses studies that have investigated the effects of instructional interventions. One of the most important aspects this chapter emphasizes is that of awareness building and the need for explicit instruction as well as ways to probe learners’ intuitions and internal knowledge since it is assumed that language learners will rely on their first language to mitigate.
