The potential of feedback to enhance learning is widely acknowledged, but its effectiveness hinges on students' ability to interpret and act upon it – a capacity known as student feedback literacy (SFL). While research emphasizes the crucial role of teachers in cultivating SFL, there's a gap in understanding teachers' perceptions and practices. This study addresses this gap by investigating how university EFL teachers in China perceive the need to cultivate SFL and their actual practices in doing so. The study's importance lies in bridging the gap between research advocating for SFL and its implementation in the classroom, ultimately aiming to improve student learning outcomes. The context is particularly relevant given China's emphasis on English language acquisition, where cultivating self-regulated learners is a key objective.

The concept of SFL, first explicitly defined by Sutton (2012), has evolved to encompass epistemological, ontological, and practical dimensions. Carless and Boud (2018) defined SFL as "the understandings, capacities and dispositions needed to make sense of information and use it to enhance work or learning strategies." Subsequent research has explored the components of SFL, including appreciating feedback, making judgments, managing affect, and taking action. While studies have highlighted various feedback interventions – such as self-assessment, peer review, and the use of rubrics – to enhance SFL, there's a lack of research examining teachers' perspectives and practices. The existing literature primarily focuses on student perspectives or assumes teachers already incorporate SFL into their teaching. This study aims to address this gap by exploring teachers' understanding and practices regarding SFL.

This qualitative study employed a mixed-methods approach combining semi-structured interviews and classroom observations. Nine EFL teachers from a university in Shandong Province, China, participated. Participants were selected using convenience sampling, considering gender, educational background, years of teaching experience, and courses taught to ensure diversity. Semi-structured interviews explored teachers' understandings of feedback and their deliberate cultivation of SFL. To mitigate demand effects, classroom observations (2-6 sessions per teacher) complemented the interview data. Data analysis involved a five-step process: reviewing transcripts, coding data (combining deductive and inductive thematic analysis), generating themes, categorizing themes, and member checking. Thematic analysis was guided by existing frameworks of SFL, such as Carless and Boud's (2018) four components and Molloy et al.'s (2020) nuanced framework. The analysis involved iterative discussions between both researchers to ensure reliability and validity of the findings. The pilot study helped refine the interview protocol.

The study revealed two main themes regarding teachers' perceptions of SFL cultivation: teachers' orientations to feedback and teachers' awareness of SFL cultivation. Regarding orientations to feedback, teachers predominantly viewed feedback as teacher-centered assessment, emphasizing their role in providing comments and evaluating student performance. While some acknowledged a two-fold aspect including student responses, the teacher remained central. Concerning awareness, most teachers did not consciously cultivate SFL, citing a lack of policy guidance, a teacher-centered perspective on feedback, and competing institutional demands. However, despite this lack of awareness, teachers subconsciously employed SFL-promoting practices categorized into three dimensions: cognitive steering (occasionally highlighting feedback's benefits for improvement), behavioral regulation (requiring revisions, linking feedback to assessments), and affective support (balancing objective comments with students' emotional needs, building rapport). These subconscious practices, however, lacked systematicity and strategic planning. While peer review was employed in some courses (writing), its implementation was affected by students' English proficiency levels. The study observed a lack of self-assessment strategies, a commonly recommended method for enhancing SFL.

The findings highlight the need for a conceptual shift in teachers' understanding of feedback, moving from a teacher-centered view to a more student-centered perspective that emphasizes student agency. The lack of awareness regarding SFL cultivation underscores the need for policy support at national and institutional levels, including specific guidelines and incentives to integrate SFL into the curriculum. This aligns with calls for systemic feedback literacy (Pitt & Winstone, 2023). The teachers’ subconscious use of SFL-promoting practices suggests that with proper training and support, teachers can effectively integrate SFL into their pedagogy. Future research should focus on developing targeted professional development programs to enhance teachers' understanding of SFL and its effective integration into classroom practices. The study also calls for further research exploring the interplay between teacher feedback literacy and student feedback literacy, considering contextual factors and student diversity.

This study provides valuable insights into university EFL teachers' perceptions and practices regarding SFL cultivation. The findings highlight a need for a paradigm shift towards a student-centered approach to feedback, coupled with policy support and professional development initiatives focused on enhancing teacher feedback literacy. Future research should investigate the effectiveness of specific interventions, consider the role of self-assessment more thoroughly, and explore how to best support diverse student needs within the SFL framework.

The study's limitations include its exploratory nature, the relatively small sample size, and the focus on a single university in China, limiting the generalizability of the findings to other contexts and disciplines. Future studies should consider larger, more diverse samples across different institutions and educational settings. Further investigation into the mediating factors influencing teachers' perceptions and practices is needed to better understand the complexities of SFL cultivation in diverse educational settings.