In this talk we frame feedback within the wider context of teaching and make the case for using a discourse analytic approach to examining feedback talk in seminar classrooms. The higher education literature on feedback has generally focused on written feedback, with scant attention paid to verbal feedback. We report on a study which built on a small but emerging body of literature focusing on verbal, dialogic feedback and its role in supporting students’ learning. We drew on discourse analysis to identify linguistic and rhetorical indicators of feedback talk in six seminar events. The feedback talk was classified into codes which formed the basis of stimulated recall interviews held with tutors of two seminars to discuss their perceptions and understandings of verbal feedback. We argue that a framework of feedback talk provides a heuristic which can help us to further understand the relationship between feedback and teaching, and which teachers can use to examine their own feedback talk.