Visual Analysis of L2 Vocabulary Acquisition Research Based On Vosviewer (2011-2021)

This paper attempts to review L2 vocabulary acquisition research from 2011 to 2021 in the hope of figuring out the related research trends in recent 10 years and offering suggestions for further studies. Data in this paper is derived from Web of Science. 1,752 articles have been reviewed. Research instrument adopted in this paper is VOSviewer. Through analysis and discussion, it is found that leading countries/regions, universities and authors have all changed over time. In terms of countries, USA once dominated but then China began to lead. As for universities, Radboud Univ Nijmegen dominated mainly in 2018, while the new university that has dominated the research situation since 2019 is Educ Univ Hong Kong. For authors, Paradis, Johanne and Chen, Xi produced more articles around 2015, but then the leading role transferred to Verhoeven, Ludo, Segers, Eliane and some independent new authors. Besides, the previous keywords were tightly around this topic “L2 vocabulary acquisition”, but with the depth of those studies, more specific and newer topics have been noticed. As for the potential trends in the future, China is gradually on the stage. There are also several new but promising countries/regions, universities and authors emerging in this field. Finally, research topics in L2 vocabulary acquisition have become more specific.

Keywords: L2 vocabulary acquisition, literature review, visual analysis, VOSviewer.