The Iranian Research on Vocabulary Acquisition: An Exploratory Review

This paper describes a set of papers published between 2015 and 2024 by Iranian researchers working on L2 vocabulary acquisition. This work is not always picked up by the standard bibliographical databases, and for this reason it is not well known to vocabulary researchers outside Iran. Nonetheless, this body of research accounts for a significant proportion of the total output of vocabulary research. This paper is a preliminary attempt to come to grips with this research: it identifies some prolific and influential authors in the data set and presents a more detailed author co-citation analysis in a series of bibliometric maps. These maps identify some important themes in the Iranian research.