Painting the ELT Research Landscape during the Pandemic: A Bibliometric Study

The COVID-19 pandemic considerably altered the English Language Teaching (ELT) milieu . Hence, this bibliometric study was conducted to sketch a broad description of the ELT research during the outbreak and reveal the conceptual, intellectual, and social structure of the field. The Scopus database was consulted to find journal articles published in English on ELT between 2020 and 2021. A total of 2,273 documents were analyzed by running Bibliometrix R-Tool. The findings on research productivity and impact under general description indicated the growing prominence of Asian countries in ELT research. The conceptual and intellectual structure analyses suggest that topics on technology and psycholinguistics have gained increasing interest. However, the social structure analysis result called for more collaboration among institutions in the ELT field. The result of this study may serve as a valuable guide for novice ELT writers on contemporary topics, prominent ELT scholars, and leading journals for reference and publication venue. For future research, ELT researchers interested in bibliometrics can carry out similar research using different databases or perform this same study after two years to paint the post-pandemic ELT research landscape.