Teacher feedback literacy in middle school EFL writing: Exploring teachers’ perceived knowledge, values, and abilities

Date

2026-9-17

Author

Yalçın Şengül, Beyza

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Written feedback plays a significant role in students’ writing development when designed and enacted effectively. Nevertheless, its ability to foster this development depends largely on teachers’ competencies, including their knowledge, values, and abilities in designing, providing, and supporting students’ effective uptake of feedback. Although feedback literacy has received increasing attention, teacher feedback literacy in middle school EFL writing classrooms remains underexplored, particularly in the Turkish context. To address this gap, this study explored middle school EFL teachers’ perceived knowledge, values, and abilities as well as how these perceptions were reflected in their written feedback practices by foregrounding Lee’s (2021) pedagogical framework of L2 writing teacher feedback literacy. An explanatory sequential mixed-methods design was employed. The initial quantitative phase involved the Feedback Literacy Scale, followed by semi-structured interviews to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the survey findings. Document analysis of teachers’ written feedback on student drafts was also conducted to identify and quantify recurring patterns in teachers’ feedback practices. The quantitative findings revealed that teachers perceived themselves most strongly in the Values dimension, followed by Knowledge and Abilities. When considered alongside the qualitative findings, this suggested that teachers’ strong valuing of written feedback and their reported knowledge were not always reflected in their actual feedback practices. The qualitative findings further indicated that teachers viewed feedback as a way to support students’ writing development and guide future learning, which reflected the formative orientation emphasized in Lee’s framework. However, teachers’ practices were shaped by various factors including time constraints, workload, rubric limitations, institutional and cultural expectations, making written feedback provision highly context-dependent. Document analysis of student drafts revealed that teachers tended to prioritize global aspects of writing, particularly content and organization, which accounted for 68.2% of all feedback points. This emphasis was broadly consistent with the prioritization of higher-order communicative goals in Lee’s framework. However, teachers’ preference for direct and authoritative feedback in the documentary data, with limited attention to emotional sensitivity, suggested a mismatch between their perceived feedback literacy and actual feedback practices. Overall, these findings underscore that teacher feedback literacy cannot be understood merely as an individual teacher competence. Rather, it is a context-sensitive phenomenon shaped by multiple factors that may lead to discrepancies between teachers’ intended feedback practices and their actual enactment. These findings also point to the importance of professional development and institutional support in helping teachers put their feedback knowledge and values into practice more effectively.

Subject Keywords

Teacher feedback literacy, Written feedback, L2 writing, Middle school EFL

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/121030

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis