Autoethnography in English Language Education and Applied Linguistics: An Integrative Literature Review

Literature reviews play a pivotal role to identify the best existing evidence for studies in different fields of knowledge. Employing an integrative literature review design, this qualitative study aims to review articles and book chapters which use autoethnography as a research method and have been published in the domain of English language education and applied linguistics over the past two decades. The reviewed documents were, with coding schemes of exclusion and inclusion criteria, collected with the extensive and intensive search on prestigious citation-tracking electronic databases, such as Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science. The searches yielded a pool of 151 autoethnographies, including 78 peer-reviewed articles published in high-ranking journals and 73 book chapters published by well-established publishers. These data sources were collected, analyzed, and reported in reflections on authors of such autoethnographies concerning a number of aspects, including (1) research context, (2) autoethnographers’ positionality and challenges, (3) justifications of methodological choices, (4) procedure for data generation and analysis, (5) strategies for ethical considerations, and (6) impacts of autoethnographies on educational practices. Built on these findings, the present study recommends that novice autoethnographers familiarize themselves with the types, foundations, justifications, methodologies, and practical implications of autoethnography so as to seek the most appropriate autoethnographic research design to tell their lived stories in their own ways. The limitations of this research are discussed, along with directions to guide researchers in their future studies.