Chinese EFL Teachers Believe in Feedback Interventions but Rarely Design Them

Feedback is one of the most powerful levers in education, capable of transforming struggling learners into self-regulated ones, yet a new study from China reveals a striking paradox: university English teachers overwhelmingly believe in the value of deliberate feedback interventions, but almost none of them actually design such interventions into their teaching. The research, published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications by Zhenfang Xie and Wen Liu of Shandong Women’s University, offers one of the first systematic examinations of how language teachers think about, and enact, the pedagogical activities intended to help students seek, interpret, evaluate and apply feedback. The findings expose a deep gap between what teachers know works and what they actually do, and trace that gap to a web of personal histories, student behaviors and institutional pressures that no single reform can untangle.

The concept at the heart of the study is feedback intervention, which the authors define as teachers’ deliberate integration of pedagogical activities designed to enhance students’ feedback literacy. This goes well beyond the classic notion of feedback as evaluative information delivered by a teacher. Drawing on the influential work of David Carless and David Boud, the researchers frame feedback intervention as an effort to engage learners as active participants in the feedback process, capable of appreciating feedback, making evaluative judgments, managing their emotional responses and taking concrete action on the comments they receive. Previous research has catalogued a rich menu of such activities: self-assessment and peer review to sharpen evaluative judgment, reflective journals and interactive cover sheets to stimulate action, exemplar analysis and rubric discussion to build understanding of quality, and feedback dialogues to foster receptiveness and emotional regulation.

What has been missing, the authors argue, is attention to the teachers who must design, sequence, scaffold and adapt these activities in real classrooms. A scoping review by Little and colleagues found that most intervention research has been conducted in health-related fields from a student perspective, leaving teachers’ cognition about feedback intervention largely unexplored. The Chinese university context makes this omission especially consequential. English proficiency in China is gated by high-stakes national examinations such as the College English Test and the Test for English Majors, fostering a result-oriented feedback culture centered on error correction. At the same time, China’s 2020 policy blueprint for deepening educational evaluation reform calls for more process-oriented approaches, creating a tension between long-standing examination practices and emerging policy directions that frames the entire study.

To capture this tension in action, the researchers conducted an exploratory qualitative study with eight university EFL teachers, purposively selected to span novice, mid-career and veteran educators teaching specialized English courses, general college English, or both. Data came from three sources: semi-structured interviews lasting between 37 and 52 minutes, two to four classroom observations per participant, and analysis of artifacts such as annotated student assignments and a peer review guide. The interviews were built around fifteen frequently cited intervention activities, each mapped to the component of student feedback literacy it primarily targets, and presented in a deliberately disrupted order to elicit more reliable responses. The transcripts, collected in Chinese, were analyzed through thematic analysis combining deductive codes drawn from prior literature with inductive codes emerging from the data itself. A second researcher independently coded two transcripts, achieving a percentage agreement of 91.8 percent.

The findings on teacher cognition reveal a telling pattern of selective endorsement. All eight participants acknowledged the necessity and potential benefits of feedback intervention, even though some initially found the term itself unfamiliar, with one teacher describing it as a completely new term and assuming it referred to administrative regulations. When it came to specific activities, the teachers strongly favored those targeting evaluative judgment, affect management and action: feedback dialogues, exemplar analysis, and the explicit specification of task requirements and assessment criteria emerged as the most consistently endorsed practices. Yet activities aimed at helping students simply appreciate feedback, such as explaining its purpose, running feedback workshops, or clarifying students’ active role in the process, were dismissed as impractical or unnecessary. One teacher asked whether students would perceive such activities as redundant, calling them self-evident truths that all students already know, an assumption the authors identify as rarely questioned despite contrary evidence.

Classroom observations told a different and more sobering story. Rather than planned instruction, feedback intervention in these classrooms was overwhelmingly improvised, a reactive response to perceived student needs rather than a deliberately designed component of teaching. One participant admitted that he did not deliberately design feedback interventions when planning his teaching content, believing it came naturally from observing students’ responses. Not a single observation session captured any activity aimed at cultivating students’ appreciation of feedback, confirming the interview data. Meanwhile, the activities actually enacted, such as clarifying assessment criteria and analyzing exemplars, aligned neatly with the institutional obsession with examination passing rates. Most striking was the case of face-to-face feedback dialogues: every participant judged them highly effective, yet almost none conducted them, citing the sheer time they consume. Similarly, the majority of participants avoided peer review altogether, discouraged by past experiences and students’ superficial participation, in which comments amounted to little more than praise.

Yet the study also contains a compelling counter-narrative demonstrating that these failures are not inevitable. One teacher persisted with peer review despite its rocky start, providing students with a structured peer review guide, modeling feedback with sample essays, and requiring revision based on peers’ comments. By the third round, she reported, student critiques had become sharper than her own, and one student observed that seeing others’ weak arguments helped him fix his own. The authors note that this success required deliberate instructional scaffolding, and they connect the broader reluctance around peer critique to culturally situated norms: Confucian-heritage values of hierarchical harmony and the preservation of face, or mianzi, may socialize students to respect teacher authority and avoid openly criticizing peers, making peer feedback particularly fragile without careful training.

The factors shaping this cognition-practice disparity proved to be multidirectional and interdependent, which the authors formalize in an interactive framework of triangular relationships among personal, student-related and contextual influences. On the personal side, teachers’ own histories as EFL learners left lasting marks, with one recalling the humiliation of having error-riddled homework displayed in class and consequently correcting her own students strategically to spare them the same experience. Individual disposition mattered too: teachers with growth mindsets and reflective habits converted professional development into practice change, while others responded to identical training with apathy. Student-related factors cut both ways. One teacher abandoned detailed written corrections after discovering that many students simply ignored them, now reserving advice for those willing to act on it; another scrapped reflective journals mid-semester when student effort proved perfunctory and anonymous mid-term surveys registered dissatisfaction. Notably, classroom observation suggested that student engagement tracked year of study and grade concerns rather than English proficiency itself.

Contextual factors formed the third corner of the triangle. Institutional fixation on CET-4 and TEM-4 passing rates, combined with the absence of supportive policies, meant that feedback intervention was always the second choice when teachers juggled their multiple identities as instructors, researchers and employment tutors. Frequent course reassignments compounded the problem, since teachers only attend to feedback refinement after teaching the same course at least twice. Digital tools offered partial relief, with online correction platforms praised for instant error detection and reduced face-threatening pressure in classes of more than 200 students. The authors argue that the resulting mismatch is not a simple failure of knowing versus doing but a negotiated trade-off under a macro-micro structural contradiction: national policy promotes process-oriented evaluation while institutional incentives still reward examination outcomes. Their prescription is a fundamental reconceptualization of feedback intervention, from incidental practice to intentionally designed instruction, supported by tripartite collaboration among teachers, students and institutions, including professional development, policy incentives and technological scaffolds, so that the activities teachers already believe in can finally reach the classroom.

Subject of Research: Teacher cognition and classroom practices of feedback intervention among Chinese university EFL teachers

Article Title: Teacher cognition and practices of feedback intervention: perspectives from Chinese university EFL teachers

Article References: Teacher cognition and practices of feedback intervention: perspectives from Chinese university EFL teachers. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41599-026-09049-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41599-026-09049-z

Keywords: teacher cognition, feedback intervention, feedback literacy, EFL teaching, higher education, qualitative research, evaluative judgement, peer review, teacher-student dialogue, high-stakes testing, institutional culture, China