Verbal feedback is the oral communication between teachers and students that aims to provide constructive guidance on students’ progress, strengths, and areas for improvement, according to numerous educational scholars (Black & Wiliam, 2009; Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Shute, 2008). In secondary school settings providing effective feedback is a key component of a good education. The effectiveness of feedback in education is a widely studied and acknowledged aspect of the learning process (Black & Wiliam, 1998; Hattie, 2009; Karaman, 2021; Wisniewski et al., 2020). As teachers continually work to improve the learning outcomes for their students, the role of feedback, especially verbal feedback that takes place in classrooms everyday, becomes increasingly important.

The “Feed Up, Feed Back, Feed Forward” model, introduced by John Hattie and Helen Timperley in their influential 2007 paper, “The Power of Feedback,” presents a cyclical approach comprising three essential stages of effective feedback. These stages encompass setting clear objectives or “feed up,” delivering feedback on present performance, and proposing strategies for enhancement or “feed forward.” This implies that teachers should provide constructive feedback that is descriptive and focused on providing specific, actionable information aimed at helping the recipient improve or enhance their performance, skills, or understanding.

Many studies on verbal feedback have been conducted in the field of foreign or second language learning, exploring different types and functions of corrective feedback and their effects on language proficiency (Lyster & Saito, 2010). These studies have shown that providing oral corrective feedback not only helps students improve their accuracy and fluency in speaking, but also enhances their overall language proficiency. Although teachers might have experience or undergo professional development courses, their formative assessment practices could not be always effective. According to certain research findings, teachers’ attitudes about the usage of various forms of oral corrective feedback in the classroom do not necessarily align with their actual practices (Kim & Mostafa, 2021). Further comprehensive research on corrective feedback is necessary to investigate the alignment between teachers’ actual practices and their underlying ideas about feedback (Karimi & Asadnia, 2015). Therefore, this study focuses on the following research question: “To what extent do secondary school teachers provide constructive verbal feedback in classroom?”

The study has taken place at Nazarbayev Intellectual school in Aktobe, Kazakhstan, and employed a quantitative research design. The sampling for lesson analysis consisted of 17 teachers representing different subjects, grade levels and teaching experience (from several months to more than ten years). The data was collected through recording videos of the 17 lessons and online survey among participants to understand their attitude on constructive verbal feedback. Ethical considerations have been considered during data collection. All teachers took part in the study voluntarily and agreed their lessons to be recorded. The confidentiality and anonymity of the participants have been ensured. The link to the survey was sent to the corporate emails. 46 teachers participated in an anonymous online survey. The analysis of video recordings was completed according to observation protocol for constructive verbal feedback influenced by observation protocols for formative assessment dimensions by Cisterna and Gotwals (2018). Our protocol consisted of four different levels of constructive feedback practice (1 being the lowest and 4 being the highest). Level 1 indicated the absence of teacher’s verbal feedback, while level 2 implied evaluative feedback where teachers had used very general and ambiguous comments like “Good job”, “Correct” or “That’s not the right answer”. Level 3 verbal feedback was mainly descriptive, focusing on the task completion, however, being not completely constructive and stimulating. The highest level of verbal feedback practice (level 4) was described as purely descriptive and specific with elaborated comments that stimulates students’ learning. Each level received respective score (1-4). Three researchers independently analysed the videos using the lesson observation protocol and the means of their scores was used to evaluate teachers’ overall oral feedback practice. The observation protocol has been designed in cooperation and discussed by all researchers before the lesson analyses to ensure validity and reliability.

The analysis of video recordings has revealed that the mean score for teachers’ overall oral feedback practice was 2.6, which indicates that feedback there is room for improvement in providing more detailed and constructive feedback to students. Teachers usually gave more evaluative feedback compared to descriptive one. When giving feedback, they mostly responded with the words “Good”, “good job”, and “correct” as well as conveyed it through gestures. This observation suggests that teachers should focus on enhancing their oral feedback practices by providing more specific and elaborated feedback that would help students understand about the ways to improve their learning. Findings from the survey demonstrate that more than half of the respondents agree that constructive feedback is time-consuming to conduct effectively. The majority of the teachers admitted that they did not take notes of the student’s progress. 43% of the teachers acknowledged that they lacked knowledge of effective feedback providing techniques, whereas the half believed in having sufficient constructive feedback skills.

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