A tale of two cultures of feedback practices in academic writing: Teachers’ voices from China and the UK higher education contexts

Abstract

Feedback is one of the most essential elements of formative assessment, playing a significant role in students’ autonomous learning and dynamic pedagogy (Armour-Thomas & Gordon, 2012). The increasing diversity and mobility of students and staff in globalised education bring challenges to localised institutional feedback practices, potentially leading to cultural collision (Bailey & Garner, 2010). Literature (e.g., Evans & Waring, 2011) shows the cultural collision of feedback makes teacher feedback more difficult to cater to students’ needs and can obstruct students’ understanding of teacher feedback, resulting in gaps in understanding between students and teachers. This study explored how assessment feedback works in master-level linguistics and education programmes from teachers’ perspectives in two distinct education settings, China and the UK. It investigated feedback cultures from three levels: micro, meso, and macro. The overarching goal is to get a more in-depth understanding of feedback cultures in these two contexts and, consequently, improve effective feedback practices and inform the development of teacher feedback literacy. This study employed a sequential mixed-methods design, featuring multiple iterations of data collection and analyses with multiple types of participants. A survey was conducted with 173 university teachers from China and 75 respondents from UK universities to investigate the similarities and differences in teachers’ perceptions of feedback and their feedback practices. Interviews were conducted with four groups of university teachers (n=16) to thoroughly understand teachers’ behaviour in the feedback process. The findings revealed how teachers decide on the design of feedback within their community, how they engage students and manage their identity and relations with others in the feedback process, and how the feedback environment has been constructed. The underlying social-cultural variations that influence teachers’ behaviour were also identified and examined in this study. Together similarities and differences in teachers’ perceptions of feedback and their feedback practices between the two countries were identified. Teachers from China and the UK have different preferences in terms of content-based feedback and corrective feedback, positive feedback and negative feedback, specific feedback and generic feedback, oral feedback and written feedback, and immediate feedback and delayed feedback. Nevertheless, irrespective of the types of feedback they provide, they all share comparable perceptions regarding feedback purposes. The goal of feedback is to enable students to manage their own learning. Teachers from China demonstrate a stronger sense of power relations and act better in fostering partnerships, whereas teachers in the UK prioritise the establishment of emotionally safe learning environments for their students. In the process of providing feedback, they are all concerned about the insufficient engagement of students in the feedback loop. Although institutional support is limited in both contexts, UK universities have a more supportive environment for feedback practices. Various socio-cultural factors were identified to explain teachers’ behaviours in the feedback process. Communication styles such as directive communication style and indirective communicative style affect how teachers design feedback and how they manage the relationships with students and their self-identity construction. The changes in feedback practices can be attributed to the assimilation and accommodation through learning experiences, research experiences, working conditions, and institutional policy. Results also show that global awareness fosters cultural sensitivity and makes teachers mindful of the potential impacts of their way of communication. In addition, the sense of power relations shapes teachers’ perceptions of their responsibilities and benefits the construction of trust between students and teachers. The survey of teachers’ perceptions of feedback and their feedback practices, along with nuanced interviews, provide a comprehensive understanding of diverse feedback cultures in China and the UK. Theoretically, the adapted framework, which elaborates on feedback cultures from three levels, can be applied in other contexts to gain an overview of feedback cultures. In practice, this study contributes to the mutual understanding between teachers and students, in particular between Chinese students and teachers in the UK. This study has identified some good feedback practices in China and the UK, which can be adapted into other contexts to better teacher feedback practices, and potentially enrich teacher training programmes and professional development initiatives. Chinese teachers can leverage the strengths of feedback practices in the UK to improve Chinese students’ feedback experience in Chinese universities. Teachers in the UK can improve their understanding of Chinese students to fine-tune their approaches to assessment and feedback.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Lulu Zhang: orcid.org/0000-0002-0544-9187

ORCID for Ying Zheng: orcid.org/0000-0003-2574-0358

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