Classroom-based research in language education

A while ago, I was asked to write an entry for the third edition of the Elsevier Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (Nesi & Milin, eds), focusing on classroom-based research in language education. The encyclopedia itself will appear later in 2026, but it will be behind a paywall, beyond the access of many people who would benefit the most from it. With this in mind, I thought it may be useful to share the ideas behind the entry here as well. If you scroll down long enough, you will also find a link that will take you to the article itself as well as a post-print, which may be useful to some.

What is classroom-based research?

Classroom-based research (or ‘classroom-based inquiry’) is one of those terms that are easy to understand but perhaps harder to define. Broadly speaking, it covers all the empirical work that teachers might carry out, sometimes together with learners and/or academics, in order to understand teaching and learning.

I use the term to distinguish such knowledge building from university-based research, the kind of activity, that is, which aims to produce generalisable findings by means of controlled experiments and other such methods. Unlike the latter, classroom-based research must use whatever resources teachers have, and it must answer whatever questions teachers need to know. This means that it tends to be relatively limited in scope, but no less valuable. As I write in Kostoulas (2026),¹ classroom-based inquiry “aims to produce insights that are practically relevant to teaching and learning, and specific to the context in which they were produced”.

Different names
for classroom-based research

Although I use the term classroom-based research as it’s a unitary thing (and only alternate it with ‘classroom-based inquiry’ or ‘school-based research’ for stylistic reasons), the truth is that the phrase is something of an umbrella term.

Some other terms that you might have come across, with which ‘classroom-based research’ overlaps (although not always perfectly), include:

• action research
• exploratory practice
• practice-based research
• reflective practice
• teacher (or practitioner) research
• language teacher research engagement
• and more…

In the introduction of her book Exploratory practice in language teaching,² Judith Hanks (2017, p. 28) talks about this terminological diversity, but I won’t go into that level of detail here. These different names serve to highlight different aspects of such knowledge building and point to diverse methodological preferences. However, if we look past this nuance, the different classroom-based inquiry traditions typically involve a number of shared features.

Shared features
of classroom-based research

In Kostoulas (2026), I list a set of recurring features that tend to cluster around knowledge-production activities that one might call ‘classroom-based research’. To be very clear, the purpose of this list is not to provide readers with a checklist for you to tick of when you design such a project. Think of these as a set of patterns that recur in different combinations, much like family resemblances,³ with no single feature being necessary in all cases, and none being sufficient on its own.

So, in no particular order, here are some of the shared features

• What drives knowledge production is a sense of professional curiosity about day-to-day teaching and learning, and a desire to improve language education;
• The people enacting classroom-based research are teachers or other education professionals (sometimes working in groups, and in some cases, alongside learners), who engage in knowledge building as part of their professional roles (rather than, say, academic coursework);
• The evidence it builds on is the incidental product of teaching and learning;
• It involves empirical rigour, which is of course proportionate the means available to teachers;
• It produces a description (or theorization) of ‘why things in my professional context are the way they are’ (Edge, 2011)⁴
• The knowledge it produces is not generalisable, but it is locally relevant;
• This knowledge travels in a variety of formats: not just articles, but also blogs, videos, personal communications and more.

Forms of classroom-based research

As I said above, there are many forms of classroom-based research – so many that I can’t possibly list them in a blog post. What I will do, instead, is show three examples (Table 1), which can help us to understand this tension between shared features and differences.

	Action Research	Exploratory Practice	Practice-Based Research
Conducted by	Teachers	Teachers & learners	Teachers & academics
Aim	Change	Profound understanding	Practical impact
Prompt	Problematisation (identifying problems & opportunities for change)	Puzzles about positive or negative aspects of lived experience	Questions relevant to practice
Methods	Mainly qualitative	Naturalistic (Potentially Exploitable Pedagogical Activities)	Qualitative, quantitative or mixed
Criteria of success	Degree of empowerment	Impact on quality of life	Ecological validity, practical relevance

Action Research

One of the most concise definitions of Action Research comes from Lewin (1948, p. 203, cited in Burns, 2005, p. 58),⁵ who defines action research as ‘research leading to social action’.

Action research essentially is a spiral process which begins when teachers identify a problem or an opportunity to improve teaching practice (problematisation) and then go on to addresses this problem or opportunity by doing something new (this is the action component). As they do so, teachers systematically observe what they do and its effects (and this is the research component), and finally evaluate their work (reflection). This then leads to the next action research cycle.

Action research tends to be qualitative. Teachers who engage in this form of knowledge production use a combination of methods, such as video recordings of lessons, photographs, transcripts of interactions, interviews and focus groups, questionnaires, journal entries, and even class output such as student scripts.

More often than not, action research is associated with critical approaches to education. It is true that some action research projects focus on more day-to-day aims, like different ways to teach vocabulary; however critical action research helps teachers better understand how practice emerges from the relationships between people and organisations, and it empowers them to challenge these relationships.

Exploratory Practice

What makes exploratory practice different from other forms of classroom-based research is that it actively involves language learners in knowledge building. As its name suggests, exploratory practice sets out to answer ‘why’ questions about how we teach and learn languages. Like action research, exploratory practice aims to produce positive change in language education, but –as Hanks (2017) reminds us–, ‘attempting change without understanding is a lost cause’ (pp. 4-5, original emphasis).

There is no ‘best way’ to do exploratory practice. However, all exploratory practice seems to share a concern about the teachers’ and learners’ quality of life. The aim of exploratory practice is to help understand how quality of life is experienced. Another shared feature of exploratory practice is that it involves collaboration – at minimum, collaboration between the teacher and the learners in a class. Thirdly, exploratory practice aims to preserve existing learning patterns and well-being. This means that it places as little burden to the participants’ workload as possible.

Exploratory practice projects begin with a ‘puzzle enquiry’. This might involve brainstorming sessions to explore what participants want to explore. Once a puzzle has been defined, its investigation proceeds without any empirical work additional to routine language teaching and learning. Rather, participants rely on Potentially Exploitable Pedagogical Activities: these are language teaching activities familiar to participants, which can incidentally produce useful data. For instance, if learners need to practice speaking, we might ask them to discuss the puzzle (e.g., ‘what is the least stressful way to learn vocabulary?’).

Practice-Based Research

A third example of classroom-based inquiry is what Masatoshi Sato and Shawn Loewen (2022)⁶ call ‘Practice-Based Research’. This is an interesting hybrid form of knowledge building that fuses elements of classroom-based and university-based research. Essentially, it involves collaborations between teaches and academics, in order to produce knowledge that is scientifically rigorous, as well as ecologically valid and practically relevant.  

Practice-based research involves three steps. It starts with teachers and researchers working together to define a research agenda. This can happen in a variety of contexts, such as classroom visits, presentations in teacher conferences, or deliberate conversations with teachers. Next, the academics and teachers work together to design and implement of a study that aims to address the research agenda. Such studies take place in real classrooms (not labs) and respect the teachers’ status as equals in the knowledge production process.⁷ Finally, the teachers examine the outcomes of the study in the context where the research questions emerged, in order to ensure their ecological validity.

Unlike Action Research and Exploratory Practice, Practice-Based Research allows for some methodological sophistication. But still, findings that are directly relevant to one setting (i.e., ecologically valid) are not easy to transfer elsewhere. That’s why the outputs of Practice-Based Research require detailed descriptions the context, which can help readers judge which findings are relevant to their specific needs.  

What makes classroom-based research good?

There’s a lot of literature describing how various forms of classroom-based research help to empower teachers and improve outcomes in language education. You can find out more about this in the encyclopedia entry (or the preprint that I have attached to this post), or by following our work at the Research Literacy of Teachers project.

Still, not all classroom-based research projects will produce equal outcomes. So, we need to find a way to evaluate the quality of the new knowledge or theorisation, that comes out of such work. This is not an easy task, because classroom-based inquiry is so diverse. It is also problematic to judge such projects using criteria that are a better fit for academic work, so what we need is a new set of conceptual tools.

Criterion	Definition
Theoretical validity	Conceptual, historical, experiential and empirical grounding of theorisation
Ecological validity	Connections of the theorisation to individual beliefs and practices, group dynamics, institutional policies and practices and sociocultural influences
Reflexive validity	Prospective and retrospective reflexive connections to pedagogy and knowledge production
Practical validity	Implications for teaching and for knowledge production

In Kostoulas (2026), I propose a set of criteria that might be helpful in appraising these emergent theorisations (Table 2).

Theoretical validity

The first of these criteria is theoretical validity. This describes how well the new knowledge connects to existing theory about language teaching and learning, the history of the profession, the teachers’ own experience and the empirical data that supports it. In the ReaLiTea project, by the way, we have developed a frame for thinking about such theorisations in a structured way.

Ecological validity

Ecological validity, the second criterion, describes how well the new knowledge interfaces with the individual, small-group, institutional and sociocultural influences in which language education happens (Stelma & Kostoulas, 2021).⁸

Reflexive validity

The next criterion is reflexive validity, which refers to how well the emergent theorisation accounts for the role of the individual teacher in shaping it. One might summarise this line of thinking in two questions, which I have adapted from Edge (2011):

• ‘what difference does it make to the theorisation that it is this teacher (rather than anyone else) who produced it?’
• ‘what difference does it make to the teacher that they produced this theorisation (rather than any other)’?

Practical validity

The final criterion in the list is practical validity. By this, I mean the potential that the new knowledge has for informing better language teaching and learning practices, and its potential for guiding future thinking about language education. What it means, really, is how well it answers the ‘so what?’ and ‘now what?’ questions.

Conclusions

Classroom-based research differs from research carried out in the academic world in many ways: these include aims, methods, and output. It produces knowledge for language education, rather than knowledge about language education. As a form of knowledge building, it is especially appealing because it can challenge the knowledge hierarchy in language education and “prioritize the experiences of those who have often been overlooked —teachers and learners themselves, with different heritages, coming from different backgrounds, in different contexts, with different, resonant, stories to tell” (Hanks, 2024, p. 4).⁹

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Notes

1. Kostoulas, A. (2026, in press). Classroom-based research in language education. In H. Nessi & P. Millin (Eds.), Elsevier encyclopedia of language and linguistics (3rd Edn.). Elsevier. ↩︎
2. Hanks, J. (2017). Exploratory practice in language teaching: Puzzling about principles and practices. Springer. ↩︎
3. Yes, I know that the notion of ‘family resemblance’ privileges a concept of family that is based on biological unity. If you object, take it up with Wittgenstein (PI, §67), who put the term forward. ↩︎
4. Edge, J. (2011). The reflective teacher educator in TESOL: Roots and wings. Routledge. This is, by the way, a book I am very fond of, even though I was for a time unhappy with the way Julian describes me. ↩︎
5. Burns, A. (1999). Collaborative action research for English language teachers. Cambridge University Press. ↩︎
6. Sato, M., & Loewen, S. (2022). The Research–Practice Dialogue in Second Language Learning and Teaching: Past, Present, and Future. The Modern Language Journal, 106(3), 509-527. https://doi.org/10.1111/modl.12791 ↩︎
7. For example, this involves respecting the teachers lesson planning, or having the teacher lead the implementation. ↩︎
8. Stelma, J., & Kostoulas, A. (2021). The intentional dynamics of TESOL. de Gruyter. ↩︎
9. Hanks, J. (2024). Shifting perceptions of inclusive practitioner research: Epistemological affordances of exploratory practice. Advance access. Language Teaching Research.  https://doi.org/10.1177/13621688241265432 ↩︎

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