Beyond Feedback Literacy: Is "Feedback Fluency" the Next Step?

Beyond Feedback Literacy: Is "Feedback Fluency" the Next Step?

From feedback capability to feedback habit

Feedback literacy has already challenged the traditional transmission model in which teachers provide information and students are expected to receive it. It positions students as active participants who generate, interpret, evaluate, and use feedback information.

Feedback fluency extends this argument by foregrounding continuity. A feedback-literate student may successfully complete a peer-assessment activity when instructed. A feedback-fluent student would habitually seek relevant information, compare perspectives, evaluate its credibility, and decide how it should inform subsequent action.

This distinction resonates strongly with my own work on learning-oriented assessment and L2 writing. In Imsa-ard (2025), sustained cycles of assessment, feedback, revision, and learner action were associated not only with improved argumentative writing but also with academic resilience. The important pedagogical mechanism was not simply the presence of feedback. It was the repeated positioning of feedback as information that learners could use in subsequent performance.

Similarly, in Imsa-ard and Barrot (2026), combining multimodal technology-mediated feedback with peer feedback created multiple routes through which L2 writers could engage with information about their writing. Learners did not merely receive teacher corrections. They encountered feedback through different modes, interacted with peer perspectives, and used the information to develop dimensions of writing complexity, accuracy, and fluency.

Viewed through the new conceptual lens, such designs may be understood as potential feedback-fluency environments. Their value lies not only in improving one piece of writing, but also in rehearsing recurring practices of seeking, interpreting, comparing, discussing, and applying feedback

From feedback opportunities to emerging feedback fluency

This interpretation is also supported by Matyakhan et al.'s (2024) study of learning-oriented assessment among Thai EFL pre-service teachers. Their intervention did not position feedback as a terminal judgement following oral performance. Instead, learners received ongoing information from teachers and peers, engaged in self-assessment, and were given opportunities to perform tasks again. Students described using feedback to adjust vocabulary, sentence connection, and subsequent oral performance, while also reporting reduced fear of making mistakes and increased willingness to speak.

Viewed through Hoo and Carless’s (2026) framework, these findings may represent the early development of feedback fluency. The learners were not merely exposed to feedback; they participated in repeated cycles of performance, feedback interpretation, self-evaluation, and reperformance. Such cycles are precisely the kinds of conditions through which feedback practices may become increasingly familiar, self-initiated, and embedded in learners’ repertoires.

At the same time, the study also reveals why feedback fluency should not be inferred solely from improved performance or positive student perceptions. A ten-week intervention can demonstrate productive feedback engagement, but it cannot establish that these practices have become durable habits or that students can transfer them to new tasks, courses, and feedback sources. Matyakhan et al.’s findings should therefore be interpreted as evidence of emergent feedback fluency, rather than fully developed fluency.

This distinction offers a useful direction for future research. Studies could follow learners beyond a single intervention to examine whether they continue to seek feedback, evaluate its quality, regulate emotional responses, and use it independently when scaffolding is gradually withdrawn. Researchers might also investigate whether habits developed through oral task reperformance transfer to presentations, academic discussions, collaborative tasks, or workplace communication.

Automaticity is useful... but also potentially dangerous

The paper’s most provocative claim concerns automaticity. Through repeated practice, feedback engagement may become more natural and require less external prompting.

This is theoretically productive, but it may also create a conceptual tension. Feedback use should not always become fast, effortless, or automatic. Good feedback engagement often demands hesitation.

Students need to decide whether advice is credible, relevant, culturally appropriate, ethically acceptable, or aligned with their communicative intention. They may need to reject peer feedback, question a teacher’s interpretation, or verify a fluent but fabricated response from generative AI. Immediate implementation is not necessarily fluency. It may simply be obedience.

The key distinction, then, is between the automatic initiation of feedback engagement and the automatic acceptance of feedback information.

What should become habitual is the tendency to pause, inquire, compare sources, inspect assumptions, and consider possible action. The final judgement should remain deliberative.

This point is particularly relevant to multimodal and peer feedback. My research with Prof. Jessie S. Barrot suggests that increasing the number and diversity of feedback channels can enrich learner engagement. However, more feedback does not automatically produce better learning. Multiple sources may conflict, vary in quality, or impose excessive processing demands. Feedback fluency must therefore involve source orchestration: knowing which source to consult, what each source can reasonably provide, and how competing information should be reconciled.

Fluency must involve adaptive judgement

To me, repetition alone is not sufficient. A student may become highly practised in completing peer-review forms without developing the capacity to evaluate quality independently. Another may repeatedly follow teacher comments but remain unable to seek or use feedback outside a tightly controlled classroom task.

This distinction is also visible in learning-oriented assessment. Repeated exposure to feedback processes matters only when students gradually assume greater responsibility for recognising standards, monitoring performance, and adapting strategies. Otherwise, repetition produces procedural compliance rather than fluency.

I would therefore define feedback fluency, if I could, more explicitly as "the habitual yet critically adaptive capacity to generate, evaluate, negotiate, and use feedback information appropriately across changing tasks, sources, relationships, technologies, and sociocultural contexts."

The phrase critically adaptive is important. Without criticality, fluency risks becoming automatic compliance. Without adaptability, it remains a routine tied to one task or classroom.

Fluent feedback engagement should therefore include at least four forms of judgement as follows:

1. Epistemic judgement: Is the feedback accurate and well founded?

2. Strategic judgement: Is it useful for my present purpose?

3. Contextual judgement: Is it appropriate within this disciplinary and sociocultural setting?

4. Agentic judgement: Should I accept, adapt, negotiate, postpone, or reject it?

These judgements become increasingly important when feedback is distributed across teachers, peers, self-assessment tools, automated systems, and generative AI.

Feedback fluency is an ecological achievement

The concept should not be reduced to an individual learner trait. Students cannot become feedback-fluent in curricula where comments arrive after learning has ended, assignments are disconnected, revision is prohibited, assessment criteria remain opaque, and feedback seeking is socially risky.

My work on learning-oriented assessment reinforces this point. Productive feedback use depends on the architecture of the assessment environment: opportunities to act, continuity between tasks, accessible standards, learner agency, and meaningful interaction. Students’ capacities matter, but those capacities are enabled or constrained by pedagogical design.

Similarly, the combination of multimodal teacher feedback and peer feedback in Imsa-ard and Barrot (2024) was potentially productive because feedback was embedded within a wider activity system involving technologies, peers, teacher mediation, writing tasks, and opportunities for revision. The effect cannot be attributed to a feedback message in isolation.

Feedback fluency is therefore better understood as an ecological accomplishment emerging from the relationship between learner agency and environmental affordances.

This reframes a familiar question. Instead of thinking about why students fail to use feedback, I think we should think about what kinds of assessment ecologies enable students to practise, refine, transfer, and eventually self-initiate productive feedback processes.

Implications for teaching and research

The pedagogical implication is direct. That is, giving students more comments will not develop feedback fluency. Teachers need to design recurring cycles of: goal clarification -> self-evaluation -> feedback seeking -> comparison of sources -> dialogue -> decision-making -> revision -> reflection.

These cycles must also occur across multiple tasks. A single peer-assessment workshop or reflective journal may raise awareness, but it is unlikely to establish durable feedback habits.

The emerging concept of feedback fluency also allows existing learning-oriented assessment studies to be reconsidered through a more developmental lens. My own research and the work of Matyakhan and colleagues show that repeated opportunities for feedback, self-assessment, revision, and reperformance can support language development and learner confidence. However, these studies primarily demonstrate what happens within designed instructional interventions. They do not yet establish whether feedback engagement becomes habitual, transferable, or sustainable after the intervention ends.

Future research should therefore distinguish among feedback participation, feedback literacy development, and feedback fluency. Participating in feedback activities does not necessarily indicate literacy; demonstrating feedback literacy in one course does not necessarily indicate fluency; and frequent feedback use does not necessarily demonstrate critical or adaptive judgement. Longitudinal designs are needed to examine whether learners continue to initiate, evaluate, and use feedback across unfamiliar tasks and changing sociocultural conditions.

This addition strengthens the commentary because it does not merely cite Matyakhan’s study as supporting evidence. It uses the study to establish a theoretically important distinction between intervention-supported feedback engagement and durable feedback fluency.

Final reflection

Hoo and Carless (2026) have introduced a concept that may move feedback research beyond the question of whether students possess feedback literacy. Feedback fluency directs attention towards what happens when feedback practices become sustained, self-initiated, and embedded in learners’ wider repertoires.

The paper also offers a clear agenda for future educational practice. Its central implication is that feedback fluency cannot be developed through isolated comments or one-off peer assessment activities. It requires feedback-rich environments in which students repeatedly generate, process, evaluate, and use feedback over time. In practical terms, this means designing sequenced opportunities for self-assessment, peer feedback, feedback seeking, reflective comparison, action planning, and revision across tasks and, ideally, across whole programmes.

This is important because feedback fluency should not be treated as another individual student attribute. It depends heavily on curriculum design. Students are unlikely to become fluent feedback users when comments arrive after a course has ended, when assignments are disconnected, or when there is no opportunity to revise. The paper therefore implicitly challenges institutions to move from episodic feedback delivery towards programmatic feedback development.

The research agenda is equally promising. Future studies need to investigate how feedback fluency develops longitudinally, how it transfers across courses and disciplines, and how it varies across sociocultural settings. Researchers also need to examine how students negotiate feedback from multiple sources, including teachers, peers, self-assessment, automated systems, and generative AI. A particularly important question is how to distinguish genuine fluency from mere repetition. Frequent feedback seeking does not necessarily indicate sophisticated feedback use, and rapid uptake may reflect compliance rather than evaluative judgement.

Methodologically, this means that one-off self-report surveys will be insufficient. Feedback fluency is developmental, behavioural, contextual, and relational. It should be studied through repeated observations, draft-revision sequences, feedback-seeking records, reflective accounts, stimulated recall, screen recordings, peer dialogue, and longitudinal interviews. The field also needs clearer indicators of progression: not simply whether students use feedback more often, but whether they become more selective, critical, adaptive, and independent in doing so.

Its greatest potential, then, lies not in portraying students as faster or more efficient users of feedback. The stronger vision is of learners who are habitually critical, contextually sensitive, technologically discerning, and agentic.

Feedback fluency should not mean using every piece of feedback smoothly. It should mean knowing how to work with feedback--and knowing when not to follow it.

On a more personal note, I have long admired David Carless’s scholarship. 🥰 His work has consistently reshaped how I think about feedback, assessment, and student agency, and he remains one of the scholars who most strongly inspires my own research and teaching. Reading this paper was therefore intellectually stimulating not only because it introduces a potentially influential concept, but also because it demonstrates how an established body of scholarship can continue to evolve, sharpen its theoretical focus, and open genuinely productive directions for future research and practice.

References

1. Hoo, H. T., & Carless, D. (2026). From feedback literacy to feedback fluency: building habits and automaticity in generating and using feedback. Higher Education Research & Development, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1080/07294360.2026.2649006

2. Imsa-ard, P. (2025). Learning-oriented assessment and L2 argumentative writing: Effects on writing ability and academic resilience. Discover Education, 4, Article 396. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-025-00779-x

3. Imsa-ard, P., & Barrot, J. S. (2026). Combining multimodal technology-mediated and peer feedback: effects on second language (L2) learners’ complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) in writing. Computer Assisted Language Learning, 39(4), 1023–1061. https://doi.org/10.1080/09588221.2024.2443770

4. Matyakhan, T., Chusanachoti, R., & Santos, J. A. L. (2024). “I think I speak without hesitation”: Learning-oriented assessment to enhance English oral communication of Thai pre-service teachers. rEFLections, 31(3), 966–989. https://doi.org/10.61508/refl.v31i3.275912