Providing emotional support through written feedback: an exploratory study of Chinese EFL teachers

Teacher written feedback serves as both an evaluation of students’ writing and a source of support for their learning. While there is extensive research on teacher written feedback in L2 writing, how teachers incorporate emotional support into their feedback practices remains relatively underexplored. This exploratory study examines the strategies employed by EFL teachers at a Chinese university to provide emotional support through written feedback. Drawing on data from seven teachers’ feedback on students’ argumentative essays, the study employed a three-stage inductive coding analysis. The findings identified three main categories of strategies for providing emotional support (encompassing seven subcategories): offering messages, directing actions, and building rapport, with offering messages emerging as the most used approach. Among these, expressing recognition within the message-offering category appeared most frequently, whereas rapport-building was the least utilized. These findings underscore the need for designing emotionally responsive feedback practices in EFL writing instruction, with pedagogical implications discussed.