Exploring the Latest Trends in L2 Teacher Identity Research: A Systematic Review of Studies Published between 2021 – 2023

The popularity of systematic reviews is growing due to their ability to assist researchers in staying updated on recent trends and current research in a specific field, prioritizing methodological and thematic aspects to ensure comprehensive coverage. This systematic review aims to reveal the direction of the recent research on English as a foreign (EFL) and second (ESL) language teacher identity, building around the location, primary and secondary focus, participants and educational settings, adopted research methods and theoretical frameworks of the studies published between the years 2021 and 2023. After conducting a systematic search on the online databases Google Scholar and Scopus, 36 articles were identified. The results of the study are as follows: (1) the recent studies on LTI have specifically concentrated on the Asian context due to its under-researched nature, (2) while the primary focus of the studies has been on identity construction/development, the secondary focus has been on emotions and emotion labour, (3) recent studies were conducted with in-service working in diverse educational settings, (4) research methods employed in the reviewed studies were dominantly qualitative, and in consistent with this, interviews and narrative inquiry were used as the data elicitation tools, (5) an integrated perspective was the theoretical framework that was utilized most often in the studies under review, indicating a new development of research.