Visualizing Research Trends in English Language Teaching (ELT) From 2013 to 2022: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

The body of literature on English Language Teaching (ELT) research is increasing, but there is a paucity of bibliometric studies in this field. Thus, this bibliometric study visualizes a cumulative statistical report on the growth of studies with their impact and presents the research trends for further directions. This bibliometric study was conducted quantitatively by analyzing publication trends by year, country, institution, and citation; leading journals and authors; keywords for emerging themes in ELT on the 803 published research articles in the Scopus database from 2013 to August 2022. For analyzing data, this study employed two software, that is, VOSviewer and Harzing’s Publish and Perish software. The findings showed that the most productive year was 2021, with 149 publications. The highest number of publications was published in Turkey ( n = 92). The highest number of publications was produced by Sultan Qaboos University, Oman ( n = 17). The highest number of citations (123) was received by the study of Bruton in 2013. The number of research studies is increasing, and the leading country, institutions, and authors are mostly from the EFL or ESL contexts. The results found that there were 144 different journals and conferences as well as 159 authors during this specified time frame. Finally, the finding showed that there were 2,460 authors’ keywords and 14,268 keywords in the title and abstract. On the basis of the analysis, this study also presents future directions for practitioners, researchers, and policymakers.