Analysis of instructors’ oral feedback practices and contextual constraints in the EFL classroom: a qualitative study

Oral feedback is widely acknowledged as a powerful tool for fostering reflective and self-regulated learning. However, at Hawassa University, Ethiopia, its effective implementation remains limited. This study explore instructors’ oral feedback practices in the Communicative English Skills course and examine the contextual challenges that impede their ability to fully promote reflective and self-regulated learning environments. Adopting an interpretative paradigm and a qualitative descriptive case study design, data were collected through classroom observations and semi-structured interviews with ten course instructors. The data were then transcribed verbatim and thematically analyzed. The findings revealed a significant gap and inconsistency among course instructors in the application of various feedback techniques aimed at fostering reflective and self-regulated learning across the observed classes. Descriptive, facilitative, and directive feedback were predominantly used, whereas motivational and peer-to-peer feedback was less common. Descriptive and directive feedback mainly focused at task and person-levels, while facilitative feedback employed at the process and self-regulatory levels. Although facilitative, motivational, and peer-to-peer feedback are theoretically more valuable to encourage self-regulated and reflective learning, the overemphasis on descriptive and directive feedback that focused on error correction and structured guidance, tended to promote student dependency on instructors’ direction. In conclusion, although instructors use a range of oral feedback techniques, contextual barriers such as large class sizes, a rigid curriculum, and limited time, hindered their ability to encourage reflective and self-regulated learning environments. This study underscores the urgent need for contextually sensitive, evidence-based strategies to support and improve instructors’ feedback practices, thereby enhancing learner autonomy in EFL classrooms.