Conceptualizations of and research on language teacher leadership: a scoping review

Recent years have seen a growing interest in language teacher leadership, or the willingness and ability of teachers to take on responsibilities that benefit the wider community. This scoping review presents the current state-of-play of language education and leadership. Specifically, we aim to answer the questions ‘how has language teacher leadership been defined?’ and ‘how has it been researched?’. To do so, we adopted a framework for conducting qualitative research synthesis. Our findings show that conceptualization of language teacher leadership tends to include both teachers' actions and roles; specifically, language teacher leadership is considered to encompasses both pedagogical and managerial dimensions. Our review highlights that effective language teacher leaders exemplify a number of qualities shared with those of good language teachers. This is unsurprising as much of our data on language teacher leadership come from learners. We highlight several pedagogical implications for developing and sustaining leadership qualities in language teachers, including through initial teacher education, continuous professional development, and mentoring and coaching, as well as their associated benefits and challenges. Although our review includes articles from a number of different countries to ensure international appeal, our findings are limited by the fact that LTL is a nascent topic of research with a dearth of data.