The role of cultural and linguistic factors in shaping feedback practices: the perspectives of international higher education teaching staff

ABSTRACT

The literature on internationalisation of higher education usually focuses on the student perspective, with intercultural competence often featuring as a graduate attribute. However, given the high proportion of international teaching staff in UK higher education institutions, more attention needs to be paid to intercultural competence of teachers. A key aspect of educational practice is feedback, which we consider to be culturally situated and affected by cultural and linguistic experiences of teachers and students. This paper presents a study which explored the conceptualisations and experiences of feedback among 18 international teaching staff at a UK STEMM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Maths, Medicine) higher education institution. Based on focus group data, we explore the dynamic relationship between culture, language and feedback, highlighting the importance of considering the intercultural dimension in feedback dialogues.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture
• feedback
• teacher feedback literacy
• intercultural competence
• sociolinguistic awareness

Introduction

The literature on internationalisation of higher education (HE) has expanded in the last few decades, with the majority of sources focusing on student experiences and the attitudes, skills and knowledge required to participate fully in international settings (Jones and Brown 2007; Robson and Wihlborg 2019). This focus on students is understandable and in line with the prevailing learner-centred pedagogies in western HE. However, as Walker (2015) points out, insights into how ‘acculturation into different styles can affect the learner turned teacher’ are equally important. This research gap between student and teacher perspectives was echoed by Green and Myatt (2011) and Sanderson (2011), with Sanderson (2011) emphasising specifically the importance of internationalisation of teachers, since teachers play a vital role in helping to hone ‘the international and intercultural sensibilities that students develop’ (Sanderson 2011, 661). Indeed many universities list a set of so-called graduate attributes – high-level learning outcomes that students should demonstrate as a result of a programme of higher education – and these often include reference to global citizenship, students’ intercultural competence, and their abilities to work in diverse and international teams (Gregersen-Hermans 2021; Trang 2021). However, over a decade since Sanderson (2011) highlighted the lack of focus on teachers when discussing internationalisation, universities are still in a situation where students are expected to graduate with certain skills, knowledge and attitudes which demonstrate their internationalised outlook, but – with a few exceptions (e.g. Vaccarino and Mingsheng 2018) – there is little consideration given to their teachers’ competence in this regard. In fact, research points to tensions that international academics experience in relation to understanding the pedagogical and communication norms when living and working in a new country (Collins 2008; Bodycott and Walker 2010; Han 2021). As Bodycott and Walker (2010) argue, intercultural competence should be a shared responsibility of both parties – students and teachers – involved in the intercultural dialogue. Further, Walker (2015) points out that academics tend to move to and stay at HE institutions for a longer period of time as compared with students, who often move into different sectors after graduation. Given this, there is a need to pay more attention to aspects of internationalisation and intercultural competence from teachers’ perspectives.

Large culture, small culture and intercultural competence

In discussing the experiences of international teaching staff and interactions between teachers and students, it is necessary to consider how the complex concepts of culture and intercultural competence are understood. A prevalent definition in the literature comes from Dutch social psychologist, Geert Hofstede, who defined culture as ‘collective programming of the mind which distinguishes one human group from another’ (Hofstede 1980, 25). In Hofstede’s definition, culture is socially constructed by members of a particular group, but importantly, groups are distinguished along national boundaries according to six dimensions – power distance, individualism versus collectivism, masculinity versus femininity, and uncertainty avoidance (Hofstede 1983), long-term orientation versus short-term orientation, and indulgence versus restraint (Hofstede 1991).

Despite its apparent utility in various settings, Hofstede’s work has been heavily criticised (e.g. Signorini, Wiesemes, and Murphy 2009; McSweeney 2002). A particularly important point of criticism is that defining culture according to national boundaries is reductionist, with some calling for less positivist views of culture that reject the very notion of national cultures (Bardhan 2011). Holliday (1999) refers to the idea of national cultures as large cultures, in which ‘cultural differences […] have been placed around ‘large’ ethnic, national and international cultural differences (Holliday 1999, 237), arguing that ‘this large culture approach results in reductionist overgeneralization and otherization of “foreign” educators, students and societies’ (Holliday 1999, 237–8). Holliday proposes to move away from ethnicity and nationhood, and instead focus on a small culture approach, in which ‘small’ refers to ‘any cohesive social grouping’ (Holliday 1999, 237). This distinction between large and small cultures expands the definition of culture beyond that of a person’s country of birth, or the nation in which an individual’s formative years were spent. In the educational context, the concept of culture is therefore opened up to encompass institutional or disciplinary cultures, for example.

Discussions about culture lead to the equally complex concept of intercultural competence, which can generally be defined as the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed in order for successful interactions to take place between people from different cultural backgrounds (Hua 2019; Deardorff 2006). According to Deardorff (2011), the overarching outcome of intercultural competence is ‘effective and appropriate behavior and communication in intercultural situations, which again can be further detailed in terms of indicators of appropriate behaviour in specific contexts” (Deardorff 2011, 66, original emphasis). A key point in Deardorff’s definition is “specific contexts”. Though Deardorff did not make this point herself, the specific contexts in which any interactions, including intercultural, take place mean that different levels of culture are at play. For example, in a university teaching context, there may be national cultural characteristics of teachers and students that need to be considered, but there will also be institutional cultural norms as well as cultural and linguistic idiosyncrasies at the disciplinary level. This means that what constitutes “effective” and “appropriate” behaviour and communication is multifaceted, taking into account the interlocutors’ linguistic and cultural experiences on multiple levels.

Culture and feedback

A key part of a teacher’s remit is feedback, which is an area of practice that is considered lacking across the sector as reflected in National Student Survey¹ (NSS) scores. Students often express dissatisfaction with feedback practices at their universities, and yet this is an essential part of a student’s learning journey (Winstone and Boud 2019). More recent understandings of feedback conceptualise it as a dialogue (Nicol 2010; Carless 2015), representing a paradigm shift away from the traditional roles of teachers as feedback givers and students as feedback receivers, and instead encouraging greater agency, self-regulation and feedback-seeking behaviours (Winstone and Carless 2019). This move requires greater student feedback literacy (Carless and Boud 2018) to act upon feedback and greater teacher feedback literacy (Carless and Winstone 2020) to create effective learning environments for feedback uptake.

Research into students’ experiences of feedback points to a variety of practices and experiences which might inhibit their engagement with feedback in new cultural contexts (Tian and Lowe 2013; Rovagnati and Pitt 2021, Rovagnati, Pitt and Winstone 2021). While these sources depict the student experience, it might be inferred that teachers educated in contexts outside of the UK may also have experienced a variety of feedback practices, some of which may differ from what is considered good practice in the new context. On this point, Walker (2015) claims that international academics are often ‘enculturated in an environment privileging knowledge, skills and attitudes shared neither by their UK colleagues nor by the students they are teaching’. This links to Hofstede’s (1986, 2001) notion of national cultures and how they shape societies and practices. While, as mentioned above, thinking of culture at such a broad national level risks applying a reductionist and stereotyping approach, it can be a helpful dimension to explore ‘culturally influenced interactions including teaching and learning’ (Walker 2015, 66), and in our case feedback. In this paper we therefore draw on some of Hofstede’s (1986, 2001) ideas but adopt Holliday’s (1999) notion of small cultures, which allows us to ‘underplay “large culture” analytical tendencies that commonly lead to cultural reification, essentialism and stereotyping’ (Tian and Lowe 2013, 581). As mentioned above, using a small culture lens also enables institutional and disciplinary (authentic) practices (Dawson, Carless, and Lee 2021; Quinlan and Pitt 2021) and cultures to be explored.

As Leask (2004) writes, when faced with a new academic culture, international staff often feel unprepared to perform their duties in line with expectations of this new context. Outside of the differences in national systems of education these feelings also stem from working in a second language, adding to potential communication issues. As language is the main tool of feedback, the ability to communicate a message successfully is crucial. This has been highlighted as an issue in the literature focusing on feedback from student perspectives (Chanock 2000; Hyland and Hyland 2001; Pazio Rossiter 2022). Such issues with language go beyond proficiency and link to culture, where conventions around language functions such as politeness and directness differ (Ogiermann 2009). This has been acknowledged by practising educational developers (Lazar and Ryder 2018), but not extensively researched from the educator’s perspective. Against this backdrop, this paper presents a study which aimed to explore the linguistic and cultural factors that impact the feedback conceptualisations and practices of international teaching staff.

Methodology

In this study we posed the following research questions:

1. What are international teaching staff experiences of feedback practices?

2. What do staff perceive to be the impact of language and culture on how they approach their feedback practice?

Given the exploratory nature of our research questions we situated the research within the interpretive paradigm. We conducted four focus groups on Microsoft Teams with 18 participants in total, who were born in another country and completed at least part of their education internationally. The value of focus groups, as opposed to interviews, lies in the interactions between the participants (Denscombe 2014). Given the nature of the research questions, we believed that the dynamic interactions would surface the cultural experiences that the participants bring. The study gained ethical approval via institutional ethics channels.²

Participants were recruited via three routes: institutional educational research and Teaching Fellows networks; an email invitation to current and the previous two years’ cohorts of students (teaching staff) on our MEd in University Learning and Teaching; a post from our departmental Twitter account, which is followed by many teaching-focused staff at the institution. Participants who met the inclusion criteria were recruited on a first come first served basis and invited to attend one of four focus groups, each consisting of participants from a range of disciplines and with a variety of national cultures and languages represented. Table 1 provides an overview of the participants in each focus group.

Table 1. Focus group participants’ national cultures, disciplinary cultures and primary languages.

	Number of participants	National cultures represented	Disciplinary cultures	Languages represented
Focus Group 1 (FG1)	3	India	Medicine	Hindi
		Netherlands	Medicine	Dutch
		New Zealand	English for Academic Purposes (EAP)	English
Focus Group 2 (FG2)	7	Germany	Biomedical Science	German
		Germany	Electrical Engineering	German
		USA	EAP	English
		Nepal	Medicine	Nepali
		New Zealand	Careers Adviser	English
		Mexico	Public Health	Spanish
		India	Chemical Engineering	Hindi
Focus Group 3 (FG3)	5	Egypt	Public Health	Arabic
		India	Medicine	Hindi
		France	Earth Science & Engineering	French
		Nepal	Medicine	Nepali
		USA	Earth Science & Engineering	English
Focus Group 4 (FG4)	3	Portugal	Medicine	Portuguese
		USA, Norway	Life Sciences	English Norwegian
		France	French Language	French

The focus group interviews were structured around two areas. Firstly, we tried to establish what the participants’ past experiences were to determine the characteristics of their small cultures (Holliday 1999), through which an interpretation of their broader experiences could be gained. This meant that the questions focused not only on culture at the national level, but we also sought to explore participants’ cultural experiences with feedback at the institutional and disciplinary level. The second part of the focus group centred around discussing feedback samples that explored different characteristics of feedback such as (overuse) of praise, the use of ‘but’, use of modal verbs, balance of positive and constructive comments, sugarcoating, etc. The purpose of this part was to uncover the cultural aspects of the language of feedback. The participants were asked to discuss each sample in terms of its usefulness as formative feedback, and then to discuss the feedback in relation to the grade that was awarded, reflecting on how the feedback might have been conveyed in their previous cultural contexts and how they would formulate the feedback now.

The data were analysed using an adapted approach to reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2021), where samples were first independently coded by each researcher. This was to enable each of the researchers to interpret the data through their cultural lens with their own biases. Each researcher took an inductive approach, using ‘open coding’ (Corbin and Strauss 1990, 12) to identify units of meaning in relation to each researcher’s reflections and ongoing familiarisation with the data. This led to the identification of several recurring ideas and expressions, which each researcher assigned codes. Both researchers subsequently discussed and compared their coding of the data to arrive at an agreed set of three themes: impact of past experiences and conceptions on teachers’ feedback practices; assimilation to feedback practices in the host culture; the language of feedback – unpacking sociolinguistic understanding. These themes are presented and discussed in the next section.

Results and discussion

Impact of past experiences and conceptions on teachers’ feedback practices

The participants’ past conceptions and experiences of feedback differed, presenting views almost on two opposite sides of the spectrum. For some participants feedback was non-existent to the extent that the concept of feedback was not reflected in the vocabulary of their first language:

I never possibly thought what feedback was. We never had the terminology like ‘feedback’. (India, FG1)

While the absence of an equivalent term to denote feedback was common, the participants experienced some practice of being given information about their performance. This, however, mostly came in the form of a grade sometimes accompanied by very limited comments, a finding often reported by international students (Warner and Miller 2015). While the majority of information was present in a numerical form, the developmental aspect of feedback that required students to understand why and how their performance could be improved was not considered part of teachers’ responsibilities. Hence the need for clarity and understanding was fulfilled through comparison with peers:

My feedback was possibly more reliant on peers … and how we could … think about or it was driven by a lot of comparisons as well … I get a higher mark or you get a higher mark, then what is it that you have done or what is it that I have done which is different? And that’s how maybe I try to understand how I was performing as a student, as opposed to maybe looking at my script and seeing what the teacher has told me about my performance. (India, FG1)

This responsibility to extract information from other sources extended beyond feedback to assessment overall:

But I felt like it was very much on the student to understand what were the expectations. So as I joined university, I had to figure out what’s coming up in the exam. What is it that teacher actually want? (Portugal, FG4)

Hence despite lack of awareness, the participants’ feedback-seeking behaviours aligned more with the new paradigm of feedback as described by Winstone and Carless (2019), where students have greater agency and engage in feedback dialogue. These past experiences link to the Hofstedian (2001) notion of power balance and how the roles of the teacher and student were embedded in the culture of the country, and more so the institutions. The interesting area to explore in this regard is whether these feedback-seeking behaviours contributed to better development of self-regulation (Nicol and MacFarlane-Dick 2006) and feedback literacy (Carless and Boud 2018).

On the other side of the spectrum were those participants for whom feedback was a well-embedded concept within educational practices of their institutions and departments, hence feedback was expected and valued. Some would go as far as to say that feedback is a societal practice that has a strong presence across different layers of society, thus making feedback a natural concept in education:

And it’s kind of part of the culture there to give people an idea and to give a response to how things are going to give a review kind of thing, to let somebody know what’s going on. … So it’s something that’s expected kind of on all levels in the society … (Norway, FG4)

This comment about practices in Norway aligns with Walker’s (2015) thinking around national systems of education representing and embedding national values. While, as the example indicates, for some participants feedback was embedded in societal practice, it tended to emphasise or prioritise different, often developmental or corrective properties and therefore was sometimes considered as lacking clarity:

I felt it was quite rare to get a teacher at school and at uni who really gave me enough feedback to work with. So I think that’s kind of influenced me as a marker. (New Zealand, FG1)

As expressed in the quote above, past experiences of receiving feedback, be it positive, negative or simply neutral, initially influenced the participants’ feedback practices in the UK. As the quote above explains, the frustration with feedback that this particular participant experienced as a student led her to ensure that her students received specific comments about how to improve their performance. Similarly, the following participant reflects on how her positive feedback experiences as a student informed her practice:

And so my first experience with meaningful feedback was when I was doing my Master’s in Public Health here, and it was a much more structured approach. And there was a lot of guidance in terms of how you can improve on your practice and on your writing, etc. And I found that really refreshing and from then on, carried this into my teaching. (Egypt, FG3).

This positive experience was identified as a result of a comparison between how she was taught in her home country and the more student-centred methods applied when studying in the current context. This triggered reflection and affected her teaching practice. Though the notion of acculturation seems to conflict with intercultural competence, which emphasises mutual learning, reciprocity and empathy (Calloway-Thomas, Arasaratnam-Smith, and Deardorff 2017), Doucerain (2019, 21) characterises acculturation as a process of ‘re-establishing “cultural fluency” in a new cultural environment through the development of multicultural mind and self’. In this way, acculturation is not simply about adapting to a new cultural context; instead it is a process of deep reflection, which seems to be what was at play in the practice of the participant from Egypt above.

Assimilation to feedback practices in the host culture

As a result of observing the practices in their new cultural context, our participants’ perceptions, practices and understandings of feedback changed. This manifested itself in the shifting ideas around what feedback should be, leading to expanded understanding and wider use of the different purposes of feedback (Winstone and Boud, 2022):

I think also the fact is being a marker here, there’s always this element of the marker justifying. So along with the feedback, there is level of justification which kind of goes along when you’re giving the feedback and trying to get a student to understand why they come under a specific mark range. (India, FG3)

For this participant, for whom feedback came mostly in the form of a grade, the role of feedback first and foremost extended to the summative function of justifying the mark. Other participants commented on extending their understanding to incorporate the importance of feedforward:

… feedback is really about improving on this work and building on it and not only explaining the marks, why they got so much. I think that’s the biggest difference I found about feedback back in Nepal and here. And I think it has to do with a bit of cultural understanding of the word being used as well. (Nepal, FG2)

Some participants emphasised the importance of equipping students in tools to self-generate and self-regulate (Nicol and MacFarlane-Dick 2006) as one of the biggest changes in their practice resulting from immersing in the practices of the new context:

But something even more lately that I feel has changed even further is the reflective component of feedback … to give them some tools to think more reflectively so that they get to a point later on that they can think about their own practice, not necessarily without me giving them feedback, but really to kind of start instilling this in them so that as they move on from my course and from the program as public health professionals, they have this sort of reflective component ingrained so that they can feedback themselves on their own practice. (Egypt, FG3)

This idea of feedback sits more within the new feedback paradigm (Winstone and Carless 2019), placing greater agency on the student and focusing on helping students develop greater feedback literacy (Carless and Winstone 2020). From an intercultural competence perspective, this also foregrounds the importance of mutual understanding and reciprocity (Byram 1997) which, in feedback contexts, means that the student is no longer a passive recipient of feedback but instead engages actively in order to understand the communicative intentions behind the teacher’s feedback.

Alongside the shift in understanding of the purpose of feedback also comes a realisation that feedback is not primarily a tool for critique, but there is value in other functions such as praise:

I see myself having to change quite significantly over these years. I think initially it was a lot about kind of getting that experience back from India for me and thinking that students actually don’t want to know what they’ve done well … And that’s what I used to focus on when I used to give feedback to actually kind of realize that it can be quite off-putting for students. (India, FG1)

This lack of focus on praise in the participant’s past experience stands in contrast with UK-based studies identifying praise as the most commonly used category (see for example Orsmond and Merry (2011)). This again links to cultural differences between contexts, with the UK considered to have a system of education based on a closer, more informal relationship between tutors and students (Walker 2015), where praise is used to maintain that relationship and cater to emotional needs of the students (Hyland and Hyland 2019).

When discussing feedback, each focus group tended to be drawn towards marking as an inherent part of feedback. Participants seemed to suggest that assimilation to the marking system in their new context was a steep learning curve, which affected how they approached feedback practice.

I think perhaps the marking schemes are different … it’s created out of a scale of 20 in Belgium and in the Netherlands it’s out of 10, but where a six is a pass or five and a half would be rounded up to six, whereas in the U.K., that’s already at 50 out of 100. So the scales are somewhere different. And at least I needed to adjust my grading based on that. (Netherlands, FG1)

This change in grading demanded a new understanding of what excellence, pass and medium grade is, and how it translates firstly onto the numerical grades and secondly onto the language of feedback; the latter being a change that was more challenging. The participant below discusses the change in terms of expressing praise:

And so people won’t say excellent unless we force them to. And they might say it’s outstanding, but then we’ll give a mark of sixty two. And you know, people really don’t like to put a spotlight on brilliance when you see it. (USA, FG3)

The participant therefore had to tone down her natural inclination to reward excellence with superlatives and adopt a more cautious approach, one that did not always come naturally. This was also the case with what the participants referred to as ‘sugarcoating’, which they claimed is a big part of the British feedback culture that stands in contrast to what they know:

Over time I felt I really needed to sugarcoat everything that I did. I needed to be very careful how I said it. I can’t be direct. I need to really say something good, something that I actually want to say and then end with something good again, even if it’s hard to find. (Netherlands, FG1)

Those participants who underwent educational training through PgCert, Diploma or MEd in University Learning and Teaching tended to attribute their changed understanding of the new cultural context (be it national or institutional) to their programme of study. This links to the value of such training for developing pedagogical expertise expressed in the literature (Ippolito and Pazio 2019; Cilliers and Herman 2010). This was also confirmed by our participants: changing their position from the teacher role to the student role led to reflection and rethinking of their feedback preferences and expectations.

The language of feedback – unpacking sociolinguistic understanding

We highlighted in the previous section that assimilating to the language of feedback was one of the aspects that participants found challenging. Given that language and culture are closely linked (Sapir 1921) and sociolinguistic competence is an important component of intercultural competence (Deardorff 2006), the discussion of the language of feedback warrants further unpacking.

Directness vs rudeness – in search of clarity

Most participants associated themselves with cultures that are thought to be more ‘direct’ in their communication style, and therefore they appreciated directness in feedback. This can be linked to Hofstede’s (2001) dimension of uncertainty avoidance, with our participants working in a context where tolerance for ambiguity is thought to be high (Walker 2015) yet coming from contexts where it is generally lower. While directness was a common cultural behaviour for the participants, it was understood that it could be interpreted as rudeness in contexts that promote a more indirect communication style:

I could see it as Dutch directness and other people would say it being rude because you’re being too forward and maybe just being used to it and being more exposed to it as a kid is OK for me, but it’s certainly not for everyone. (Netherlands, FG1)

This understanding was confirmed by those participants who come from contexts considered to be more nurturing, where element of directness, translating into exclamation marks on students’ pieces of work, was considered to be demotivating and had a negative emotional effect:

And the same way I studied French in New Zealand and I always hated getting my French feedback from my French lecturer because it was always horrible, full of exclamation marks and don’t do this. And I just felt terrible about myself. (New Zealand, FG1)

Hence the participants from cultures with high uncertainty avoidance (Hofstede 1986) appreciated the clarity that directness gives, yet those with high tolerance of ambiguity treated directness as having a negative emotional impact on their uptake of feedback, making it difficult to manage affect (Carless and Winstone 2020).

Sugarcoating – reassurance or masking

As alluded to above, sugarcoating was mentioned as one of the main features of feedback in the UK context. As the main purpose of sugarcoating is to soften the impact of criticism and therefore offer a more polite version of critique, it is closely linked to communication style associated with British culture (Ogierman 2009). In practice this more politely worded feedback is often realised through the ‘feedback sandwich’, a technique that used to be recommended to novice teachers as an effective way of giving feedback (Baume and Baume 1996; Robson 2014). Those participants who were used to and expressed a preference for directness, associated such language with masking true performance and therefore interfering with the interpretation of the intended message:

I do want to know what I’ve done wrong rather than have the sugarcoated version of it. And then trying to tease out of that, which I think maybe a British student might be far more attuned to it from childhood to tease out the elements and say, well, these are the things that I really need to work on. So I think initially for a student coming from another country especially, I think that can be an issue. (India, FG2)

The quote above discusses the issues with interpretation that are also echoed in the literature. Over three decades ago MacDonald (1991, 3) warned against the use of a ‘sugar coated pill’ when providing written feedback. He suggests that students might perceive that the sugar coating (the positive feedback) on the bitter pill (the negative feedback) ‘has no purpose of value, other than to make the “true” message more palatable’. Students are therefore likely to miss what they are doing well or do not fully understand what they should be doing differently. This concern has been expressed by Molloy (2010), Pazio Rossiter (2022) and also echoed by our participants:

And then you see a “bit disappointed and this wasn’t clear”, like, you know, some good politicians … But it’s actually, to an extent, giving that more critical feedback in the sense might actually benefit the student because the student realises, well, I’ve actually missed something really major out here and I need to take care when I do my next lab report. (India, FG2)

Participants coming from cultures that are considered to be more nurturing and having greater tolerance for ambiguity (Hofstede 2001), appreciated this more positively worded feedback and saw its purpose in terms of reassurance and encouragement:

I don’t see it just as sugar coating. I do find it helpful to know what they thought was good about it, which is I think what I found frustrating growing up was not getting that feedback and not getting enough feedback about what I did right or wrong. (New Zealand, FG1)

This raised the question of what is the place of niceness in feedback. Participants who were critical of sugarcoated feedback approached any kind of praise with caution. They were questioning the intentions of the teacher, looking for signs of a false compliment, where the feedback was positive but the grade would suggest otherwise. Hence there is a level of mistrust when it comes to praise, especially in the absence of marks:

And then you get a feedback which is nice. Sometimes I feel that is it really nice or is it someone trying to be sweet to me or someone trying to just say that you’ve done nice, you know, because you have to tell something nice? (Portugal, FG4)

Having said that, greater immersion in the culture, partially as a result of educational training, helps those lecturers who do value directness and approach praise with caution understand the rationale for its use in the new context. It is not so much about masking but rather about encouragement, and that is an important point to realise:

So I think that’s when you kind of realise while I would not like to see it sugarcoated … it’s a reassurance for the students what they’re doing. (France, FG3)

Interpreting what is a mandate and what is a suggestion – phrasing a need for improvement

While there was a general agreement that the purpose of feedback is improvement, the interpretation of how the improvement is phrased in written feedback differed across the participants. There was a general tendency to feel that ‘there’s also the cultural tendency to underestimate or downplay things here’ (USA, FG2). By ‘here’, the participant was referring both to the UK and to the institutional culture of the university where this research was conducted. This is reflected in the language used around improvement that, according to this participant, tends to be softer:

Yeah, I think it’s the same way that I write feedback as well with the mights and coulds and whatever. But I very much sort of take that to be British for “this is what you should do”. So like they won’t tell you that this is what you should do. They’ll say “it could be better if you … ”. Whatever, it means, do that! (USA, FG3)

This, again links to the previous discussion of politeness and how it can be expressed in different languages (Ogierman, 2009), which can only be fully understood after a longer immersion in the target culture. However, some participants would still retain the subtle differences in the meaning:

I would use that on someone who’s basically there and there are minor things. They could improve but it’s already great; for the student I would say, like, make sure you do this. (New Zealand, FG2)

The discussion of sociolinguistic awareness links to perceptions of how feedback is conceptualised. Participants who would consider feedback to be advice, therefore operating on a less hierarchical distribution of power between teachers and students (Hofstede 2001), would treat feedback as recommendations rather than instructions:

I also write my feedback in these tenses because I feel that it’s a suggestion and students are not obligated to improve their work. (Portugal, FG3)

Hence the language of feedback can be affected by cultural norms, be it national or disciplinary (Dawson, Carless, and Lee 2021) or by how the underlying purpose of feedback is understood.

Conclusions

According to our data, the cultures of teaching staff play an important role in feedback conceptualisations and practices, which are influenced by teachers’ past experiences of feedback in their national cultures as well as small cultures (Holliday 1999), such as institutional norms and strategies around learning and teaching. Acculturation takes place as a legitimate process of deep reflection on cultural practices rather than simply adapting to the new cultural context. This means that intercultural competence becomes an essential tool in teachers’ feedback literacy (Carless and Winstone 2020; Pazio Rossiter and Bale 2023). Currently, the intercultural dimension is not explicitly integrated into feedback literacy models. This warrants greater prominence in the feedback discourse, given the importance of culture in facilitating effective feedback dialogues. This also has implications for practice: we would argue that pedagogic training for teachers ought to embed reflection on culture and intercultural competence, and how it might impact feedback practices in specific contexts. As discussed above, intercultural competence is about reciprocity and mutual understanding; any training around intercultural competence should therefore apply to all teaching staff, not just those coming from other countries. Having said this, the research presented in this paper has focused purely on international staff, so there is scope to explore how intercultural competence and feedback practices are conceptualised by teachers who are from the target culture as well as from a broader range of disciplinary cultures. Additionally, if we accept that feedback is a dialogic process, further research must include student perspectives. These remarks represent limitations of the current study, but also denote areas for future research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Final year undergraduate students in the UK are invited to complete the National Student Survey, which gathers feedback on students’ experiences of higher education.

2. Approval number: EERP2021-077