A Bibliometric Analysis and Future Research Directions on Language and Literacy

There has been considerable research conducted in the area of language and literacy focussing on themes such as reasons and factors, performance and achievements, ways


Introduction
In this contemporary world, the conventional and long-established notion of literacy (or illiteracy) as the capability (or incapability) of reading and writing has now begun to take on a new practical aspect.This aspect is conceptualised within different domains as possessing knowledge, skills, and competence in particular fields for specific purposes.One is expected to comprehend the gist of certain areas and to connect with it accordingly.With the current growing number of fields and fast-paced advances, multiple literacies emerge as contemporary trends-computer literacy, media literacy, academic literacy-among others.Nevertheless, amidst all the new concepts of literacy, the authors are interested to explore the directions of "language and literacy" because they remain relevant and important for academic success (e.g., Glew et al., 2019;Brooks, 2019) and is a primary influence in the general education literature (e.g., Kim & Johnson, 2021;Lysenko et al., 2019).This study delved into the research directions and trends of language and literacy by looking at related studies in this area, examining the impact of publications and visualising some bibliometric networks (Ahmi, 2022;Ahmi & Nasir, 2019;Ahmi & Mohamad, 2019) of language and literacy.
From an empirical standpoint, the field of language and literacy is a well-established, and flourishing research area.However, it appears that a comprehensive bibliometric study that captures the growing state of the field is scarce.A search for bibliometrics analysis articles within the social sciences and education spheres generated minimal results; and those that identified with bibliometric analysis were limited to the following trends: foreign language teaching (e.g., Yilmaz et al., 2022), gamification (e.g., Marti-Parreno et al., 2016) and technology in Higher Education (e.g., Jiménez et al., 2019).According to Ahmi (2022), a bibliometric analysis is relevant across disciplines; be it in science, technology, or social sciences.As a powerful tool to examine scientific outputs, bibliometric analysis is able to zoom into a specific area of research and identify its structure, research trends, as well as themes (Liu, 2022).However, this technique of analysis is more popular in science, and technologyrelated research.As a field that is exponentially expanding both in terms of theories and practices, bibliometric investigations on subject matters such as third language acquisition, (Liu, 2022) and reading literacy (Lan & Yu, 2022) would capture the field's potentials; especially in providing empirical and practical resources (Lan & Yu, 2022;Liu, 2022).This study therefore addressed the current paucity in bibliometric analysis and future research directions on language and literacy, specifically aiming to: 1. quantify the research field and describe its main outputs and evolution, 2. identify the most productive contributors of the language and literacy field, 3. identify the most investigated themes of language and literacy.
In light of the aims, this paper sought to answer the following research questions: a) What is the current publication trend for studies in language and literacy?b) Who are the most productive contributors in the field of language and literacy?c) Which themes are the most popular among the scholars of language and literacy?

Literature Review
In the 21 st century, the ability to read, write, and understand information is still very much relevant and influential to one's academic achievement (Mohd-Asraf et al., 2016) as well as employability (Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, 2022).The interpretation of what it means to be literate has also changed to include and reflect the literacy demands of today's world, as well as the society that we live in.From this standpoint, literacy is defined as the "understanding, evaluating, using, and engaging with written texts to participate in society, to achieve personal goals and ambitions and to develop knowledge and potential" (Kangan Institute, 2021).
The broaden understanding of literacy as the ability to read, write, speak, and listen in ways that permit one to communicate effectively to various types of audiences will allow one to make sense of the world.In addition, it is important to realise that reading and writing, when combined with speaking, listening, viewing and critical thinking will establish beneficial aspects of literacy in modern life.Undoubtedly, literacy is a vital element in ensuring one, especially a student, to have the best prospect in his or her studies and daily life.
The literature on language and literacy has experienced a consistent expansion in the last decades.However, even with the rising interest in language and literacy, not much has been achieved in terms of systematically categorising the articles that contributed to the area of language and literacy, especially in the more recent period of time.The existing studies paid attention to the following themes: the evolution of language and literacy within child language (Guo, 2022), bilingualism (Kayadibi, 2022), technology-based learning (Muhammad Fuad et. al., 2022), teacher's feedback (Xie, 2022), third language (L3) acquisition (Liu, 2022) and academic literacy (Meza, 2021).Yet the more universal bearing and current trends in the language and literacy field is lacking and needs to be highlighted.This research therefore attempted to gain a general and systematic overview of the extant research on language and literacy on the basis of three main levels of bibliometric analysis, namely the sources, authors, and documents.

Materials and Methods
This study used the Scopus database in bibliometric analysis and mapping which aimed to ascertain the global developments and trends in language and literacy over a specific period of time, encompassing the main analysis of sources, authors, and documents.The data were extracted on January 21, 2023, from the Scopus database, as depicted in Figure 1.For the purpose of this study, the keyword search in Scopus was set between year 2000 and 2023 and article titles that contained "language" AND "literacy" were included.Only English-language article publications were chosen, and all selected documents were checked to ensure there were no duplicates in the sample.This led to the extraction of a total of 1,463 records, or article journals.All records were included in the bibliometric study.

Main information
Table 1 provides an overview of the dataset run for this study.A total of 1,463 articles from 542 journals were identified from the Scopus database from 2000 to 2023.The average citations per document is 20.22 while average citations per year per document is 1.833.In terms of authors, 3,348 authors wrote these articles; 392 documents were single authored while the remaining 2,956 documents were multi-authored documents.The collaboration index was 2.82, which means on average, two to three authors have written an article.The next part of the paper will present the findings based on the research questions listed earlier.

Current publication trend for studies in language and literacy
In terms of publication trend for studies in language and literacy, Figure 1 shows the number of articles published according to year, beginning with 2000.It is found that within the period of 22 years , there is an increasing number of papers published in the area of language and literacy, recording manifold of increase throughout the years.This indicates that the area of language and literacy is still relevant and has increased in popularity in the recent years.The most productive contributors in the field of language and literacy To address the most productive contributors in language and literacy research, this study analysed the following data: a) most relevant sources, b) most relevant affiliations, c) most productive authors, and d) most cited papers.
Most relevant sources "The most relevant sources" is a reference to "analysis that identifies each source's total number of publications" (Ahmi, 2022, p. 106).It demonstrates the productivity of the source title.For language and literacy, the Early Childhood Research Quarterly is the highest contributor of publications with 44 articles.

Most relevant affiliations
The findings have also shown the most relevant affiliations in the field of language and literacy, which refers to the productivity of publications based on the institutions that the authors affiliated themselves with at the time of publication.Based on Figure 2, the Ohio State University produced the highest number of publications in the field (64 publications),   ).The former represents intra-country collaboration whereby all authors belong to the same country while the latter denotes inter-country or international collaboration in which the authors belong to different countries.Congruent to the earlier results on authors and affiliations, the United States produces the most publications with 493 SCP and 35 MCP.This is followed by the United Kingdom (71 SCP and 17 MCP), Canada (60 SCP and 14 MCP), followed by Australia (59 SCP and 9 MCP).Other corresponding authors' countries are detailed in Table 3 below.2013) examined the impact of a prekindergarten programme that implemented a coaching system and consistent literacy, language, and mathematics curricula on these and other non-targeted, essential components of school readiness, such as executive functioning.Like Weiland and Yoshikawa, the third and fourth most cited publications are oriented on the ECE.Justice's work on, "Quality of language and literacy instruction in preschool classrooms serving at-risk pupils" characterised the quality of language and literacy instruction in public pre-schools that serve at-risk children.It is found that the quality of language and literacy instruction in classrooms is at the low level, although some teachers convey high quality instruction.The paper entitled "The comprehensive language approach to early literacy: The interrelationships among vocabulary, phonological sensitivity, and print knowledge among preschool-aged children" by Dickinson (2003) discussed the relationship between oral language and literacy skills, which included 533 preschool children on their receptive vocabulary, phonological awareness, and print knowledge.Interestingly, in the top ten list of most cited papers, only a small number deals with literacy and science as highlighted in two studies; the first one by Yore et al.'s (2003)

Trend topics
The article proceeds with the trend topics analysis which looks at the evolution of terms based on "the start year of the terms' first appearance, the last year they were shown, and the year's median" (Ahmi, 2022, p. 165).Figure 5 displays the trend topics in a graph form containing the author's keywords from 2000-2023 in the field of language and literacy.The topmost five topics since 2020 are "translanguaging", "socioeconomic status" and "shared book reading", "higher education" and "COVID-19".It is anticipated that COVID-19 and higher education topics have gained popularity of late due to the global pandemic that hit the world.It is also interesting to witness the topic of translanguaging gaining significance.Translanguaging-the use of different languages together-is a powerful tool.It is "the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages, in order to maximise communicative potential" (Garcia, 2009, p. 140).In other words, translanguaging is about communication, and not just about language itself.

Co-occurrence network
Co-occurrence network is when "two or more things occur together or simultaneously" (Ahmi, 2022) which uncovers the conceptual structure and associations between concepts (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017).This section explains the co-occurrence network in the language and literacy field.Based on Figure 6, there is a thick line between the nodes of "literacy" and "language" with "reading", which indicates the stronger relationship between these two keywords.The bubble size of the following keywords namely "language", "literacy" and "reading" are also larger.This shows that these words are used more by the academics.The findings have also identified five thematic clusters in terms of language and literacy research.
The themes were coded into and differentiated by the distinct colours (refer to Figure 4).Table 5 contains the details of the categorisation: Red : Cluster 1 -General development in language and literacy Blue : Cluster 2 -Language and literacy in Early Childhood Education (ECE) Green : Cluster 3 -Language and literacy in English as a Second Language (ESL) Purple : Cluster 4 -Issues in language and literacy Orange : Cluster 5 -Language and literacy for bilinguals Cluster 1 is composed of six keywords: "language development", "home literacy environment", "literacy development", "dual language learners", "bilingual" and "head start"; signalling the broad-spectrum of topics in language and literacy.Cluster 2 involves thirteen keywords, which are oriented on the ECE part of language and literacy.ECE is considered as one of the greatest investments a country can make to ensure the continuity of progress because it prepares the children for learning and future growth.Cluster 3 contains ten keywords (e.g., "English language learners", "language learners", "English learners") related to ESL.In 2023, English is still the most widely spoken language in the world (Statistics & Data, 2023), which concurrently explains the emergence of this cluster.Cluster 4 is the largest cluster with 16 keywords such as "language policy", and "academic literacy" reflects the various issues or subjects in the area of language and literacy.Lastly, Cluster 5, with five keywords ("bilingualism", "bilingual education", "spelling", "reading comprehension", "biliteracy") highlights the research of language and literacy in bilingualism.As the world becomes more borderless, many people develop bilingualism to meaningfully engage with members of different linguistic groups.Figure 6.Co-occurrence network Table 5 presents the details about the nodes or cluster where they belong, together with their betweenness centrality (showing which nodes are "bridges" between nodes in a network), closeness centrality (measuring the closeness to other nodes) and page rank (measuring the nodes whose influence extends beyond their direct connections into the wider network) (Disney, 2020 in Ahmi, 2022, p. 181).

Thematic Map
The next section will present the thematic map which allows an assessment of topics based on the quadrants.The upper right quadrant shows the motor themes that are characterised by high centrality and density.The motor theme in this quadrant is "early literacy", and it is connected to other concepts such as "English language learners" and "oral language".They are considered as the most developed theme in the literature, and the key concerns within the language and literacy field.The upper left quadrant represents high density themes but with insignificant external links-which render them as themes with low centrality and have limited importance for the field.Figure 7 shows that there are no actual themes located in the upper left quadrant but "reading" and other related concepts like "phonological awareness" and "vocabulary" are situated in the middle of both the upper quadrants, which signals that although they are quite specialised, they are also gaining prominence in the field of language and literacy.
The lower left quadrant, which conveys themes that are marginal and inadequately developed, represents either emerging or disappearing themes.In Figure 7, it can be seen that "language assessment literacy", "bilingual education" and "digital literacy" are among the emerging but weakly developed themes.Apart from that, there are also themes that are becoming increasingly unpopular, such as "emergent literacy", "language development" and "home literacy environment".
Finally, the lower right quadrant displays transversal, general, and basic themes which are vital, but not developed.From Figure 7, there are no themes found in this quadrant, but "literacy", "language" and "preschools" are the themes that belong to the shared quadrants of upper right and lower right; thus, indicating that the themes are gaining importance in the language and literacy field.

Conclusion
In the present study, the authors set out to examine the literature on language and literacy acquisition over the period of two decades (2000-2023) through analysing the changes in influential sources, authors, institutions, and countries.This bibliometric analysis offers an overview of the state-of-art for language and literacy.It has presented a review of the academic literature dealing with the evolution and progress of language and literacy in the Scopus databases.It is found that the area of language and literacy has undergone positive expansion as evident from the increase in the number of publications in this field.The most popular and widespread issues discussed within this field are related to ECE, English language and ESL which; can be observed from the kinds of most popular journals, most cited authors, most occurred keywords and the co-occurrence network or clusters.
Consequently, the thematic map has also shown that ECE and ESL are still predominantly important scopes within the field; shown through phrases like "early literacy", "early language learners", "literacy", "language" and "preschool".Nevertheless, terms like "emergent literacy", "language development" and "home literacy environment" are found to be disappearing despite its close relation to ECE and ESL.This may be due to the "overpopularity" of these terms during the time when they were in trend, which was in the early years of the millennium.The more prevalent keywords nowadays include COVID-19 (refer to Figure 5), in line with the COVID-19 pandemic that struck the whole world and left a significant impact on all aspects of life including education as well as research and publication.
Inferring from the findings of this research, a future vision of language and literacy will still be oriented to the five clusters identified.It is foreseen that language and literacy will also expand into other areas like digital literacy.Digital literacy is an area of growing importance; particularly due to the emphasis placed on enhancing international communication skills to facilitate 21 st century learners' success in global interaction and communication.
Finally, the limitations of this paper should also be addressed.Firstly, the data were only extracted from the SCOPUS database.Even though SCOPUS, which was introduced by Elsevier in 2004 is the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed research literature, it is much younger than Web of Science (WoS) (Murudka, 2022).Therefore, future study can be expanded by extracting data from other databases, especially WoS.The next limitation is related to the types of documents looked at, which covers solely journal articles.In future study, the inclusion of other types of documents such as books, and indexed conference proceedings would provide complementary insights on the subject matter.Given that the area of language and literacy seems perennial, further bibliometric analysis could also be extended by running the three fields plot, co-citations, and collaborations analyses to provide a more holistic picture.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Flow diagram of the search strategy Source: Zakaria et al(2020)

Figure
Figure 1.Annual publication trends The second highest is the International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism with 31 articles, followed by the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy with 24 articles.Next come the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, and the Reading and Writing journal.Each journal published 23 articles.Interestingly, the next three top journals in the field of language and literacy are Early Childhood Education Journal and Early Education and Development with 22 articles each, and Early Child Development and Care with 19 articles-all of which are related to early childhood education.
followed by the University of California (57 publications), University of Virginia (35 publications) and Florida State University (34 publications).It is observed that in the top ten list, nine universities are from the United States and one institution is from Denmark (AARHUS University).The other universities in the list are from Australia (La Trobe University, University of Melbourne), the United Kingdom (University of London, University of Oxford) and Canada (University of Toronto).

Figure
Figure 7. Thematic map

Table 1
Main information regarding selected articles.

Table 2
Weiland and Yoshikawa's (2013)racy and L2 writing instruction" obtained the highest number of citations.In this empirical investigation he introduced the principles of genre-based language instruction and drafted broad classroom models, specifically on English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approaches.Hyland (2007)also explored what it means to implement genre teaching in more practical terms, setting out some keyways in which teachers can plan, sequence, support, and assess learning.The second highest citation isWeiland and Yoshikawa's (2013)article entitled "Impacts of a Prekindergarten Programme on Children's Mathematics, Language, Literacy, Executive Function, and Emotional Skills".Weiland and Yoshikawa ( "Examining the literacy component of science literacy: 25 years of language arts and science research" and Moje et al.'s (2001) "Maestro, what is 'quality'?":Language,literacy, and discourse in project-based science".The other highly cited papers are listed inTable 4 in which each article received above 250 citations.

Table 5
Details of the 5 clusters