Supervisory Feedback: The Weight of Compliments, Criticisms and Suggestions Revisited

Though not a novel topic, supervision and its contribution to teachers‟ professional development has been given renewed attention in recent years. The constructive/destructive role supervision might play in teachers‟ instructional path has been addressed by a plethora of investigations, and the frequency and effect of different kinds of comments and feedback on teachers‟ conduct has also been explored in previous research. However, the findings of research on supervisory feedback and their effect still seem to be blurred. Informed by this need for further research into the issue, the researchers in the current study strived to investigate the proportion of comments given by supervisors to language teachers. In so doing, the researchers analyzed an existing corpus of supervisory report on 30 EFL supervisees, at a Language school in Gonbad-e-Kavoos, Iran. The sample was composed of 16 males and 14 females. The results gained through Kruskal-Wallis test revealed no significant differences among the groups of supervised teachers concerning the frequency of criticisms and suggestions; however, the frequency of compliments offered to the teachers with different levels of experience differed from one another. In fact, the frequency of criticisms, suggestions and compliments correlated with the years of teachers‟ experience. The implications of the findings are discussed throughout the paper