Proven or Promising? Global TELL Trends and Patterns in Foreign Language Education

In recent decades, language education has focused on TELL research, that is expanding however there has been dearth of systematic review of TELL studies from the Web of Science Core Collection, the most demanding journals, spanning from 2006 to date. Lack of composite analyses hinders our understanding of the field's global footprint and methodological issues. To address this gap, the researcher systematically reviewed a data set of 20 open-access articles published between 2006 and 2025. This systematic review following PRISMA, searched on the key variables publication years, geographic publication, research aims, research design, participants, instruments, and status quo of TELL findings. The findings demonstrate a dramatic increase in TELL studies since 2015 and led primarily by the U.S., Taiwan, and China. Based on the research trend, it appears there are studies focused on the evaluation of different aspects of the digital tools, pedagogical framework development, and the learning and teaching contexts. There is a predominance of university students as study participants and most studies relied upon mixed methodologies. The tools identified included surveys, learners & educators learning management (LMS) system use, virtual reality technologies (VR), and bibliometric software for article analyses. While learning outcomes in general have been favorable, there are still some realities such as user overload (motivational), sociocultural factors, and teacher readiness that remain. Adjudicated by studies published, this systematic review provides valuable insights and one important contribution in particular: a mapping of two decades of TELL studies and has highlighted regions of the world that are underrepresented and learner identities that are limited within studies. This recent review has shed light on the need for TELL studies to consider broader learner identities, not just certain learner contexts, on broader research on developing contact-sensitive/informed pedagogies, and research has demonstrated a lack of theoretically informed pedagogies