Inclusive English Language Teaching: Bibliometric Analysis of Multilingualism and Inclusive Classroom Practices

Abstract

This bibliometric analysis examined published research on multilingualism and inclusive classroom practices in English Language Teaching retrieved from the Scopus database from 2017 to 2025. Guided by three research questions, the study mapped publication trends, leading journals, authors, institutions, and dominant thematic clusters across 56 articles using VOSviewer for keyword co-occurrence visualization. The findings revealed a steady acceleration in publication output over the analyzed window, with inclusive education and English language teaching emerging as the dominant theoretical anchors of the field. The United States and Indonesia led the field in research output, followed by a globally distributed tier including Poland, Iran, Spain, and South Africa. The University of Warsaw (3 publications) and Isfahan University of Technology (2 publications) ranked as the most productive institutions, while Chan and Lo, Lau and Shea, and Nijakowska et al. registered as the most cited authors. The keyword analysis clustered scholarship around inclusive, multilingual, EFL/ESL, and higher education strands, with peripheral domains such as decolonization and disability-inclusive pedagogy remaining underdeveloped. The findings provide a foundation for advancing evidence-based, multilingual, and equitable ELT research through the next decade.