A 30-year Perspective of Bibliometric Analysis on Teacher Cognition: Toward Teacher Development

Abstract

Teacher cognition, the system of teachers’ mental lives, has a great impact on teachers’ instructional practices and professional development. However, a comprehensive exploration into the overall scholarship in the teacher cognition field through a bibliometric lens is lacking. By using VOSviewer1.6.16, this bibliometric analysis aims to profile the research landscape on teacher cognition by identifying the development trajectory, country contributions and collaborations, the most productive authors and journals, and the research foci based on 440 documents retrieved from the Scopus database (1993-2022). The findings indicate progressive growth in the publication trend on teacher cognition, especially in the last decade. The publications are mainly geographically distributed in the United States, China, and the United Kingdom. The United States leads others in terms of contribution and collaboration. Borg S., Feryok A., and Johnson K.E. emerged as the most productive authors, and System, Language Teaching Research and Teaching and Teacher Education the most prolific journals. The topical foci identified are (1) language teachers’ cognition from a sociocultural perspective, (2) teacher professional development, (3) teacher education and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ cognition, (4) novice ESL teachers’ cognition, (5) teacher beliefs and teaching practices. It is concluded that teacher cognition, especially language teacher cognition has grown into a well-established and crossperspective field of study and it will conceivably remain a promising subject.