Analyzing Research Tendencies of ELT Researchers and Trajectory of English Language Teaching and Learning in the last Five Years

Abstract

In accordance with the new advances in language teaching methodologies and integration of high technology tools as well as web applications, there are many scientific research published on English language teaching (ELT) and learning (ELL) in recent years. However, on the one hand, it is still a significant question to research that exactly what types of research topics are mostly studied among the researchers from different countries. What are the leading research groups on the world? Even though there are noteworthy studies to clarify mostly studied topics and trajectory of the researches on ELT by means of literature reviews, and there are very few studies to compare research tendencies of the researchers over text/content mining methodology. In fact, the papers reviewing literature are mostly limited in terms of depicting a broad understanding the scope of such studies. On the other hand, a corpus based detection methodology, which may illuminate those research tendencies and trajectory, and come up with very informative descriptive results in the field, is actually missing. In sum, the current research aims at finding out the most frequent research contexts and topics in the last five years through analyzing research papers published in leading academic journals in the field, and compare tendencies of the researchers from different institutions and countries in terms of selecting their research context and topics, and to figure out the trajectory for future studies. In this study, the researchers believe that there are different tendencies among the researchers in terms of their selecting research contexts and topics, which should be revealed for future researches. Researchers use a corpus-based detection methodology in this study, which is composed of storing variable data in .txt files and analyzing variables over the concordancer. Corpus-based detection method defines process of gathering textual data mentioned in the variables and analyzing them by means of a concordancer, named AntConc. The corpus-based data from the variables are analyzed by means of a statistical software, known as JASP in order to clear out potential differences among the researchers. A short analysis of the data indicates that the researchers still focus on the key words such as explicit learning and knowledge, implicit learning and knowledge as well as age and bilingualism. It is also observed that meta-analysis is an important topic in the studies conducted lately. Further results of the study could be beneficial for all followers including researchers and learners inside and outside the field of ELT and help people focus less frequently studied contexts and topics.