Feedback in EFL Classrooms: A Narrative Review of Definitions, Characteristics, Functions, Types, and Challenges

Abstract

Research on feedback in English language education has grown rapidly. Nevertheless, its findings remain scattered across studies that each address a single aspect, such as corrective feedback types, peer feedback, or Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated commentary, in isolation. Teachers and researchers seeking an integrated understanding must assemble it from separate sources. This article presents a narrative literature review that draws these strands into a single reference covering five dimensions: the definition and nature of feedback, the characteristics that mark it as effective, its functions and benefits, its types across five classification lenses (source of provision, correction variation and timing, modality, skill context, and nature of the message), and the challenges of implementation. Sources published between 2020 and 2026 were retrieved through the Consensus academic search engine and screened for relevance to the English as a foreign language (EFL) context, with seminal pre-2020 works retained as conceptual anchors. Across all five dimensions, the literature converges on one distinction: feedback supports learning when it treats the learner as an active participant rather than a passive recipient of judgment. Benefits such as accuracy gains and feedback literacy depend on that participation, and expanding the supply of feedback through automated tools does not, by itself, produce learning. The review closes by mapping underexplored areas, including descriptive versus evaluative feedback and under-researched EFL contexts such as Eastern Indonesia.