Language teacher beliefs and teacher education programs: A 25-year methodological synthesis (2000-2024)

Language teacher beliefs are one of the main strands of teacher education research, and numerous studies explore how teacher education programs affect the development of such beliefs through the enacted program. There is a paucity of research, however, on the methodological design of these studies and what characterizes their initiatives. The aim of this research synthesis was to review and map out the methodological arrangements of the studies and illustrate how they implement their desired program. A comprehensive search was done in the three databases of Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar with keywords related to language teacher beliefs and cognitions. A total number of 104 studies were identified and coded in 10 sections, which include such factors as (a) methodology, (b) theoretical framework, (c) data collection instruments, (d) number of participants, and (e) participants’ career stage. The results indicate an overall lack of clarity with the ontological framework of the studies, which is especially pronounced in light of the prevalence of qualitative designs within the corpus. Further, there is often a misalignment between the studies’ ontological paradigm and the methodological choices made. The findings call for greater ontological transparency, a higher degree of alignment between the theoretical framework and the methodological blueprint of research studies, and a broader and more versatile toolkit in identifying, examining, and transforming language teacher beliefs. The synthesis provides recommendations for advancing research on teacher beliefs through the methodological apparatus in this strand.