Understanding student teachers’ learning from negative experiences of feedback during teaching practicum: A feedback literacy perspective

Abstract

Although the majority of studies have examined student teachers’ perceptions, emotional experiences, and responses during their teaching practicum (TP), there is a scarcity of research focusing on English as a foreign language (EFL) student teachers’ internal and behavioural responses to negative feedback from mentors or supervisors. Feedback literacy, as a comprehensive concept encompassing internal factors, offers an innovative perspective to explore the characteristics and interplay among learners’ cognitive, affective, and behavioural capacities when dealing with feedback. Therefore, from the perspective of feedback literacy, this study investigated how student teachers cope with negative feedback experiences during TP. This study involved 16 student teachers from five teacher education programmes at the four selected Chinese universities in Sichuan, Fujian, Guangdong, and Macau contexts in China. Multiple data sources were collected, including participants’ narrative reports, semi-structured interviews, and teaching documents. The results revealed participants’ various situations of feedback literacy to cope with negative feedback experiences from their university supervisors and school mentors during TP. Student teachers’ feedback literacy is crucial in mediating their responses to negative feedback experiences, which started with their appreciation of feedback by understanding its meaning, conflicts, and difficulties. Following that, they did not necessarily generate negative external and internal judgements towards negative feedback. Meanwhile, it enabled participants to regulate their emotions with diverse external or internal strategies to respond to such feedback. The findings of this study also provided pedagogical implications for student teachers and teacher educators, respectively.