Open Access © The Author(s) 2025. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Inter- national License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. RESEARCH Taguba and Plata Language Testing in Asia (2025) 15:28 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40468-025-00362-z Language Testing in Asia Engagement strategies and reasons for disengagement with teacher feedback: insights from L2 senior high school students in academic writing Harold Taguba 1 and Sterling Plata 2* Abstract Teacher feedback is a critical component in L2 academic writing classes. Despite exten- sive research on how feedback affects students’ writing and confidence, influences on how students engage with teacher comments remain unclear. The present study addresses this gap by exploring the engagement strategies of L2 senior high school students and the reasons for their disengagement. The results of the semi-structured interviews uncovered strategies for cognitive, affective, and behavioral engagement. Analyzing disengagement through the lens of L2 writing self-efficacy, low linguistic confidence and weak self-regulation were identified as contributing factors. These results suggest the need to embed feedback engagement strategies in academic writ- ing instruction and to provide targeted interventions to address the lack of linguistic confidence and self-regulation among students with low L2 writing self-efficacy. Keywords: L2 writing self-efficacy, Student engagement, Academic writing, Feedback literacy Introduction Second language learners grapple with vocabulary, confidence, task complexity, and aca- demic writing demands (Tsao, 2021; Safari & Ahmadi, 2024; Soh, 2022). Beyond instruc- tion, teacher feedback supports students in overcoming writing challenges (Sánchez, 2024). Despite research on feedback’s role in improving writing and confidence, teachers still question why their comments do not always lead to better writing (Ma, 2023; Zheng & Yu, 2018) e above-mentioned gap led to a new wave of research focusing on student feedback literacy that is premised on students’ engagement with feedback. Students can accept, modify, or reject feedback (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). is means that students can play a proactive rather than reactive role in utilizing teacher comments and demonstrate their active learning engagement during the feedback process (Tay & Lam, 2022; Yu et al., 2020; Malecka, et al., 2022; Nieminen & Carless, 2023; Winstone et al., 2019). *Correspondence: sterling.plata@dlsu.edu.ph 1 Western Bicutan National High School, Taguig, Philippines 2 De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines