Research syntheses in L2 vocabulary research: A scoping review

In this brief report, we present a scoping review of 31 second language (L2) vocabulary research syntheses published in the Web of Science from January 1990 to May 2022. The purpose of this undertaking was to understand what L2 vocabulary research synthesizers have aggregated and the investigative foci they intended to address. It was observed that most of the cataloged reports were experimental design meta-analyses, and thus there was room for future research syntheses in the vocabulary space to consider correlational research questions and hypotheses. Because systematic reviews were relatively scarce, there is also a need for these types of syntheses to be conducted in the future, especially those focused upon the observed quality of aggregated L2 vocabulary research.