Mapping English language teacher resilience: a bibliometric analysis

Introduction Teacher resilience has emerged as a central construct for understanding professional sustainability, well-being, and adaptive functioning in English language teaching (ELT). Although conceptual and empirical interest in ELT teacher resilience has expanded rapidly, existing synthesis work has been limited by single-database coverage and inconsistent validation, constraining cumulative knowledge building and obscuring the field’s intellectual and thematic structure. Methods The study employed a multi-database bibliometric mapping design to consolidate and validate research on English language teacher resilience. Bibliographic records were independently retrieved from Web of Science and Scopus using identical search strings and inclusion parameters. Following cross-database validation of temporal, thematic, and geographic robustness, the datasets were merged and de-duplicated, yielding a final corpus of 293 publications. Bibliometric analyses were conducted in R using the bibliometrix package, including performance analysis, co-citation analysis, keyword co-occurrence networks, thematic mapping, and conceptual structure analysis. Results Results indicated that ELT teacher resilience research remained marginal until 2018 but entered a phase of rapid expansion from 2021 onward. Knowledge production was concentrated among a small core of authors, journals, and countries, with limited international collaboration in high-output contexts. Co-citation analysis revealed a highly cohesive intellectual structure anchored in positive psychology, teacher emotion research, and adaptive models of professional functioning. Keyword and thematic analyses showed that resilience functioned as an integrative construct embedded within emotional regulation, occupational stress, motivation, and well-being, rather than as an isolated trait. Despite thematic density, constructs such as teacher identity, motivation, and technology use remained weakly integrated. Discussion The results position English language teacher resilience as a rapidly consolidating yet structurally imbalanced research domain. While the field demonstrates strong theoretical coherence and psychological grounding, persistent reliance on cross-sectional designs and uneven conceptual integration limit developmental and process-oriented understanding. The study underscores the value of multi-database bibliometric validation and highlights the need for longitudinal, integrative, and theoretically aligned future research in ELT resilience. These results further indicate that teacher education programs and educational authorities should embed structured, developmentally informed resilience support within professional development systems rather than relying on isolated well-being initiatives.