Research in language teaching over two decades: A retrospective of the first 20 volumes of Language Teaching Research

Since 1997, Language Teaching Research (LTR) has published hundreds of research articles, most of which have reported on empirical studies whose broad purpose was to increase understanding on how second or foreign language teaching can be improved. These articles, as a collective whole, can be viewed as an artifact of the research issues and topics that interested LTR scholars in the time period around the beginning of the 21st century. Moreover, because of the journal’s special focus on research, a survey of the first 20 years of LTR’s articles holds the potential to monitor the field at large over that time period. Via a survey that examines the main focuses of each of the 359 articles under categories as ‘Instructional effects’, ‘Teacher cognition’ and ‘Learner behavior’, this study serves as an extant inventory of research interests over the first 20 years of the journal’s existence. Copyright © 2017 The Author(s).