Digital multimodal composing in language education (2010–2025): mapping trends, intellectual structure, and emerging themes

Digital multimodal composing (DMC), defined as the purposeful orchestration of language, image, layout, sound, and other modes to achieve communicative goals, has attracted sustained attention in language education. However, this expanding evidence base has not been consistently translated into actionable guidance for teacher preparation. Drawing on 449 Scopus-indexed journal articles (2010–2025), this bibliometric review combines performance analysis with VOSviewer-based science mapping, a set of techniques for visualising how topics, references, and publications are connected across a research field. The review summarises publication trends, leading outlets, and major contributors; maps author-keyword co-occurrence with overlay visualisation to examine temporal visibility; and uses cited-reference co-citation analysis and document-level bibliographic coupling to identify the field’s intellectual foundations and recent research fronts. Results indicate increased publication output after 2020 and a visible core of publication outlets, with the top 10 journals accounting for 38.1% of the corpus. The maps show a recurring conceptual core around multimodality and multimodal composing, linked to L2 writing pedagogy and assessment. Overlay patterns show later average publication years for classroom-facing DMC and sociotechnical concerns, including generative AI and translanguaging-oriented perspectives. The review offers evidence-informed recommendations for teacher education, including making genre and design criteria explicit, multidimensional assessment, and embedding ethical and critical guidance for AI-mediated and translingual multimodal composing.