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Theoretical Analysis, Classroom Practice, Opinion Essays 

 

Three Key Problems in Classroom Language Education Research 

 

Andy Curtis 

City University of Macau 

 

Abstract 

 

This opinion essay begins by describing the problematic difference between “doing-research-on” 

and “doing-research-with,” particularly in relation to classroom-based research on 

foreign/English language teaching and learning. In “doing-research-on,” the researchers are the 

primary beneficiaries of the research they publish, whilst those who provided the data, the 

researched—in this case, the teachers and the students—typically do not benefit from the 

research published. However, when research is done with the data-providers, such as teachers 

and/or students, all parties can benefit from the research, even if not to the same extent and not in 

the same ways. In the second part of this opinion piece, the publish-or-perish problem is 

acknowledged, with a brief consideration of how it has been shaping research and publishing for 

nearly a century. The third part of this opinion essay draws on “trickle down” economic theory to 

discuss some of the reasons the findings from published research in our field so rarely seem to 

feed back into the classrooms from which the data were gathered. In the last part of this opinion 

piece, I propose some ways of addressing these problems, with specific experiential examples. 

 

The “Doing-Research-On” vs. “Doing-Research-With” Problem 

 

Before we begin, a couple of clarification points need to be made here. First, although I refer to 

“universities” in this essay—as the vast majority of what is published on our field is written by 

university professors—I am including any tertiary education institutions, such as some colleges, 

in which academic staff are expected to carry out and publish research as part of their contractual 

obligations. Second, although most university professors, as well as carrying out and publishing 

research, also teach courses, those courses are typically taught in universities to university 

undergraduate or graduate students. However, when I refer to “busy classroom teachers,” I am 

referring to a markedly different professional demographic of teachers whose main roles and 

responsibilities revolve around classroom teaching. 

 

 At the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) International 

Association (TIA) 2023 international convention in Portland, Oregon, several high-profile 

presentations were given, many based on recent book publications, which highlighted and 

reiterated the importance of English language classrooms, learners, and teachers. However, in 

my experience—around 200 mostly TESOL-related publications over 30 years, and having 

served on a variety of TIA boards and task forces—I believe that those presentations are, at most, 

only half right about the findings coming out of and feeding back into the language classroom. 

Only half right because, while the data on which those publications are based do indeed come 

from classrooms, teachers, and students, how those parties benefit from such publications—in a 

clear, concrete, and timely manner—is not at all clear. 

 

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 Furthermore, I believe that few of the classroom teachers and learners who kindly 

provided all those data—without which there would be no such publications—rarely (if ever) 

benefit, directly or even indirectly, from such publications (Curtis, 2023). If that is the case, then 

a key question is: If not for classroom teachers, then who is this classroom-based research being 

written for? The answer appears to be that researchers in our field (and in other fields) are, in 

fact, writing for other researchers, in spite of claims that the research that comes out of the 

(language) classroom feeds back into it. A corollary question regarding the readership of such 

research is: If language education researchers are mostly writing for each other, then how can the 

providers of the classroom data (the teachers and the students) benefit from this kind of research? 

 

 This disconnect can be referred to as a problem of readership-in-reality vs. purported 

readership, i.e., professional researchers (typically in universities) vs. busy classroom (language) 

teachers. More than 30 years ago, in 1990, Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Susan Lytle published, in 

the Educational Researcher, a paper titled, “Research on Teaching and Teacher Research: The 

Issues That Divide.” They started their short paper by expressing their concerns that:  

 

Limiting the official knowledge base for teaching to what academics have chosen to 

study and write about has contributed to a number of problems, including discontinuity 

between what is taught in universities and what is taught in classrooms, teachers’ 

ambivalence about the claims of academic research, and a general lack of information 

about classroom life from a truly emic perspective (p. 2, emphases added). 

 

 Given the intervening decades since that 1990 paper, an important question becomes: 

What, if anything, has changed between now and then regarding, for example, what academics 

choose to write about, the disparities highlighted, the ambivalences, the etic-emic 

(outsider/insider) perspective problems, etc.? And while we would like to believe that the 

teaching-research divide identified by Cochran-Smith and Lytle has narrowed, that the gap has 

gotten smaller, it is still the case that it is (very) rare that the teachers and the students in the 

classroom decide what gets researched and what gets published. That is, instead, decided by 

other researchers, journal editors, grant-reviewing bodies, panels on professorial employment, 

promotion, tenure, etc. For example, if some journal editors decide to publish a special issue on, 

say, task-based language teaching and learning, translanguaging, social-emotional concerns, 

artificial intelligence, the latest iteration of ChatGPT, etc., then that is what research will be 

carried out, and that is what research will be published. Driving the business end of that income-

generating, professorial career-building cycle is the publishers—not only of those journals, but 

also of the books and book series that either follow or precede the journal publications. Might it 

not, then, be healthier for all parties if we just openly and honestly admitted that we, the 

researchers and our domains of disciplinary knowledge, are as susceptible to fashions and fads as 

any other industry? 

 

 A few years after Cochran-Smith and Lytle (1990), Kenneth Zeichner looked “Beyond 

the Divide of Teacher Research and Academic Research” (1995, pp. 153–172), and found that: 

“Currently [28 years ago] many teachers feel that educational research conducted by those in the 

academy is largely irrelevant to their lives in schools. On the other hand, many academics 

dismiss the knowledge produced through teacher research as trivial and inconsequential to their 

work” (p. 153, emphasis added). The same question asked of the Cochran-Smith and Lytle paper 

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can be—and I believe should be—asked here too, i.e.: What, if anything, has changed since 

then? It is, of course, important to manage one’s cynicism regarding deep-level, long-term, 

meaningful and fundamental changes in (language) education (or the lack thereof). Nevertheless, 

in this regard, one can be forgiven for recalling the line attributed to the French writer, Jean-

Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808–1890) in 1849, in his self-published satirical magazine. In the 

original French, Karr wrote “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” literally translated into 

English as “the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing” but more commonly rendered as 

“the more things change, the more they stay the same.” 

 

 And while language education researchers who rely on classroom data may no longer 

“dismiss the knowledge produced through teacher research as trivial and inconsequential to their 

work,” there is still the essential question of how relevant to the day-to-day lives of teachers and 

students in school is the research published, even when it describes itself as “classroom-based”? 

Authors of another paper from decades ago, adjacent to language education, in music education, 

asked: “Interdisciplinary Curriculum: Music Educator Concerns: What is interdisciplinary 

learning? Does it work better than traditional subject-area learning? Who really benefits?” 

(Wiggins, 2001, p. 40, emphasis added). The somewhat cumbersome 20-word title culminates in 

the same question I have found myself asking at more and more conventions and conferences—

as well as whilst reading several hundred published papers in our field (and in many others) over 

the last 30-plus years: Who really benefits from these academic presentations and publications? 

 

 A fourth example, also from the dawn of the new millennium, asked another question in 

the same vein, in this case, more specifically regarding publications by faculty members in 

marketing departments: “Who Are We Really Talking To?” (McKenzie et al., 2002, p. 1196, 

emphasis added). The authors found that the majority of the marketing professionals they 

surveyed “neither read nor recognized ... the great bulk” of the papers in their field published in 

academic journals, and they concluded that “whatever efforts are made by marketing faculty to 

publish their work, their readership, most likely, will be disappointingly exclusive” (McKenzie et 

al., 2002, p. 1196, emphasis added). The emphasizing of the titular “really” is to underscore the 

point that publications in our field (and others) that are claimed to be for the benefit of busy 

classroom teachers and their students may be published primarily for many other reasons, such 

as employment, annual academic reviews, promotion, tenure, performance-pay bonuses, grant 

applications, etc. And whilst all of those may be perfectly valid reasons for publishing papers, 

books, etc., it would be disingenuous of us to hide those reasons behind claims that we do what 

we do for the benefit of busy classroom teachers and students. 

 

The “Publish or Perish” Problem 

 

According to Seema Rawat and Sanjay Meena (2014, p. 87) the phrase “publish or perish” (PoP) 

can be traced back to the Harvard University history professor, Archibald Cary Coolidge (1866–

1928), who served as the first director of the Harvard University Library and the editor-in-chief 

of the policy journal Foreign Affairs, and who apparently coined the term “publish or perish,” 

which subsequently found its way into print in the early 1930s in a book written about his life 

(Coolidge & Lord, 1932). At that time, and for a long time afterwards, the PoP phrase was 

considered to be an encouragement to scholars to publish the findings of their research in 

respected and recognized academic journals—and as an admonishment or a warning to those 

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scholars who did not do so. However, in more recent decades, that 90-year-old PoP mantra has 

been increasingly questioned, across a number of disciplinary areas. For example, in 1986, in the 

Annals of Internal Medicine, Marcia Angell, lamented the fact that: “Because promotion and 

funding of physicians in academic medicine are closely linked to the number of their 

publications, investigators feel impelled to publish as frequently as possible” (p. 261). Angell 

warned that, as a result of PoP pressures: “a number of unfortunate practices in medical 

publishing [occur] including undertaking trivial studies because they yield rapid results, 

needlessly reporting the same study in installments, reporting a study more than once, and listing 

as authors people only marginally involved in the study” (p. 261). Angell went so far as to 

suggest that such pressures may even “be a motivation for fraud” (p. 261), marking such 

behaviour as borderline criminal. 

 

 More recently, Gideon Parchomovsky (2000) discussed the challenges of PoP in relation 

to “the economic and legal rules of patent law” (p. 961). And in the area of management studies, 

in an article titled, “Publish or Perish: Bane or Boon of Academic Life?” Mark De Rond and 

Alan Miller (2005) reminded us that: “There are few more familiar aphorisms in the academic 

community than ‘publish or perish.’ Venerated by many and dreaded by more” (p. 321), 

discreetly and deftly alluding to the fear-factor behind the phrase. Based on a quick review of 

publications beyond our field of language teaching and learning, the fields of medicine and law 

appear to have been more willing to challenge the PoP orthodoxy. For example, in 2008, in the 

Journal of Clinical Investigation, in an article titled, “Publish or Perish, But at What Cost?” 

Ushma Neill wrote that: “Under pressure to generate voluminous output, scientists often fall prey 

to double publishing, self-plagiarism, and submitting the ‘minimal publishable unit.’ Are these 

ethical gray areas, or true transgressions?” (p. 2368). Neill considered, and responded to, a 

number of related questions: “Is publishing the same set of data twice acceptable (clearly not), is 

using the same text in several articles plagiarism (perhaps), and is publishing newly obtained 

data after the fact acceptable (maybe)?” (p. 2368). Papers such as these (by Angell [1986], De 

Rond & Miller [2005], Neill [2008], and others) show that one of the reasons for the “doing-

research-on” vs. “doing-research-with” problem is the PoP problem, which may drive 

researchers to behave in more self-serving ways in which the publications are seen more as a 

means to an end, rather than as ways of informing and improving (in our case) language teaching 

and learning in the classroom. 

 

 However, in “Revisiting Publish or Perish” (Bond, 2023), rather than revisiting the PoP 

driving-force, as the title of her paper leads us to believe, Bond reinforced its dominance, writing 

that PoP: “has been widely adopted by academic institutions as a tool to incentivise individual 

staff members to publish scholarly articles to enhance both their own reputation and career 

progression, and thereby the reputation of the institution itself” (p. 1, emphases added). As 

Bond’s paper was published in a pharmaceutical journal, there is a striking absence of any 

reference to those who provide the data for such publications, i.e., the patients who take the 

drugs dispensed by the pharmacists. Bond concluded that, in 2023: “With the increasing use of 

publications in performance indicators for academic staff as they progress through promotion 

rounds, and for institutions themselves as they compete with each other in ranking tables and for 

government funding, the expression is probably as true today as ever” (Bond, 2023, p. 1, 

emphases added). Whilst that may still be so in Bond’s field of pharmacy, there are some 

encouraging signs that things may be changing elsewhere.  

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 For example, also in 2023, in Higher Education Research & Development, Nomanesi 

Madikizela-Madiya (at the University of South Africa, in Pretoria) reported on: “Transforming 

higher education spaces through ethical research publication” in her “critique of the publish or 

perish aphorism” (pp. 186–199). And while Madikizela-Madiya acknowledged that PoP 

publishing is “a condition for survival in academe,” she also stated that PoP: “resonates with the 

imperatives of neoliberalism that privilege individual success, entrepreneurship, prestige, 

promotion (self- and institutional) and monetary gain” (p. 186), reiterating, although negatively, 

some of the points made by Bond (2023). As noted above, McKenzie et al. (2002) concluded 

that: “whatever efforts are made by marketing faculty to publish their work, their readership, 

most likely, will be disappointingly exclusive” (p. 1196, emphasis added), with which 

Madikizela-Madiya concurred, describing PoP as “exclusionary for survival of academics [with] 

ethical and social justice implications” (p. 186). Madikizela-Madiya (2023) described PoP 

publishing as “exclusionary” on the grounds that “research processes are unethical because 

research participants are not informed of the exclusionary nature of publications,” adding that 

“the supposed contribution of research and publication for societal good is marginalised as 

academics try to find shortcuts to publish for their professional survival” (p. 186). Madikizela-

Madiya (2023) concluded that: “the publish or perish dictum elides social justice issues and 

undermines academic identities, and the dignity of the communities from which data are 

extracted are at [sic] jeopardy” (p. 186, emphasis added). And whilst Madikizela-Madiya’s 

position on PoP appears to be more extreme than mine, she and I share the same concern for the 

classroom teachers and learners, who provide the data for the publications that benefit those who 

publish, without benefitting those without whom there would be no such publications. 

 

 I will conclude this brief review of some of the PoP literature from different disciplines, 

from the 1980s to the 2020s, with another 2023 publication, “Publish or Perish? How Legal 

Regulations Affect Scholars’ Publishing Strategies and The Spending of Public Funds by 

Universities,” by Musiał-Karg et al., who criticize the “the use of public money on publishing in 

predatory journals” and the “acceptance of this kind of publishing” (p. 1). The rise of so-called 

“predatory journals” is beyond the scope of this piece, but it seems clear that PoP pressures are 

one of the driving forces behind this rise (see, for example, Bartholomew, 2014; Desmir, 2018; 

Richtig et al., 2018).  

 

The Trickle-Down Problem in Classroom Language Teaching-Learning Research 

 

So-called “Trickle-Down Economics” (TDE) is based on the idea that if certain countries, 

corporations, and individuals accumulate great wealth, then that wealth will, eventually, trickle-

down to the masses, thereby benefitting everyone. Looking at the socio-economic, educational, 

and other inequities around the world today, this has clearly not been the case. In fact, on the 

contrary, the rich appear to have gotten even richer and the poor even poorer during the years of 

the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic (see, for example, Lu, 2022). Some right-wing economists, 

billionaires, and political leaders still cling to the idea of TDE, even though it has been debunked 

and discredited for at least 40 years. For example, in 1983, the economist Heinz Arndt 

vigorously stated that: ‘“Trickle-down’ is a myth which should be exposed and laid to rest. No 

reputable developmental economist ever, explicitly or implicitly, endorsed any such theory in 

any of its various alleged versions” (p. 1). Decades later, Antonia Juhasz (2002), reporting on 

“The Failure of Globalisation” (pp. 407–420), more than 20 years ago, explained that:   

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At the heart of the globalisation model is a commitment to global corporations acting as 

the engines of economic growth and a belief that the wealth they create will trickle down 

to the rest of society. Instead, its policies lock wealth at the top ... decreasing access of 

developing countries to the tools necessary to improve their social condition and 

strangling democracy” (p. 407).  

 

Yet, in spite of decades of economic data showing clearly and conclusively that TDE only 

benefit the already-richest countries, corporations, and individuals, the myth persists. For 

example, in 2023, Wright-Maley et al., in the title of their article, referred to the “Trickle-Down 

Lie that Just Won’t Die” (pp. 1–20), describing TDE as “a fallacious metaphor that hurts 

working people and the civic commons” (p. 1), and referring to publicly-funded places and 

spaces for local communities to come together, such as libraries, parks, community centres, etc. 

 

 The pernicious persistence of the TDE myth reminds me of the “native-speaker myth” in 

our field, although we, at least, appear to have made much more progress in this area than some 

economists and politicians have regarding the TDE myth (see Holliday, 2006, for an introduction 

to native-speakerism). However, it does appear that we may have our own trickle-down problem 

of assumptions in foreign language education research, in which we assume, for example, the 

following, positive pattern. Researchers collect classroom data from teachers and students, which 

they then analyze, write up, and publish, thereby embellishing their CVs, and increasing their 

chances of employment, tenure, promotion, etc. The teacher whose classroom was the source of 

that data then reads the published paper, as a result of which, the quantity and quality of teaching 

and learning in the classroom improves. I know I am not the only person in our field who sees 

the glaring problems with such assumptions, which are, at best, convenient, and at worst, simply 

naïve. But why do such positive patterns and virtuous cycles appear not to happen? (at least, 

nowhere near as often as we might hope or like to assume).  

 

 It has been a humbling, enlightening, and deeply enriching experience to be able to meet 

with (face-to-face and online) thousands of TESOL professionals from around the world (in their 

home countries, and elsewhere, such as at conferences and conventions) over the last 30 years. 

During those encounters, there are a number of topics that I regularly ask the teachers about, 

including questions about research, mainly related to whether or not they do research themselves 

(and why/why not), and if they read the published research of others (and again, why or why 

not). Most of the classroom language teachers I have met neither carry out research nor read 

research, most often citing lack of time as one reason for not engaging with or in the research in 

our field. However, time has become an almost automatic answer to any question about anything 

that we believe we should be doing, such as eating more healthily and/or doing more exercise, 

but which we are not doing: No time! Not enough time! Need more time! 

 

 Fortunately, before COVID-19, most of my international conversations with classroom 

teachers were in-person, face-to-face, and mask-less. And perhaps one of the areas in which 

online conferences can never replace in-person gatherings is the unplanned and incidental 

interactions between conference attendees/participants, which is where and when some of the 

most interesting and important discussions can happen. (Unfortunately, people cannot “bump 

into each other” online, no matter how many virtual breakout rooms we create.) And it has been 

during these “asides” when teachers have told me that, in addition to the problem of never-

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enough time, there are other reasons for them neither carrying out nor reading research. 

Regarding teachers not carrying out research, the main recurring reasons told to me (apart from 

time) include lack of research methodology expertise, lack of access to data-gathering, and lack 

of data-analyzing hardware and software. Teachers also shared not being given permission by 

their institutions to gather classroom data and the fact that the schools where they taught did not 

value such research, even if it was published. In a significant number of schools, such research 

was even discouraged, as it was seen as “a distraction” from the business of teaching and 

learning. However, over the decades of having these discussions, more schools in more places 

seem to be appreciating it when their teachers present at conferences, whether local, national, or 

international, partly because this helps to raise the profile of the school/college in ways that a 

published paper may not. In addition to these discussions, there are data to support what teachers 

have told us about the challenges they face when attempting to carry out research. For example, 

in the recent TESOL RPC Research Priorities Survey 2022: Report on Findings (Douglas & 

Marshall, 2023), nearly 1,000 TESOL professionals responded to the question about “Challenges 

to Carrying Out Research” (p. 9). The largest group of responses was “miscellaneous,” with 

approximately 21% (211 out of 979), but the next three highest challenges were: “Research 

Design” (147/15%); “Funding” (115/11.7%); and “Workload” (110/11.2%). 

 

 Regarding not reading research, many teachers concurred with the findings of Zeichner 

(1995), discussed above, who found that: “Currently many teachers feel that educational research 

conducted by those in the academy is largely irrelevant to their lives in schools” (p. 153). The 

teachers who have talked with me, as professional language educators, noticed that the language 

used in the publications—including those that were based on data from their own classrooms—

was the language of researchers writing for each other, and therefore typically more technical 

and not teacher-friendly. Some teachers also noticed that the more prestigious the journals 

appeared to be, the less accessible the language was for readers whose working lives are spent 

mostly in classrooms. Fortunately, in more recent years, work has been published on, for 

example, bridging “the teaching English as a second language (TESL) research-practice gap by 

fostering the formation of and supporting professional learning communities (PLCs) in adult 

ESL instructional contexts” (Abbot et al., 2018, p. 1). Also addressing this specific challenge, 

Abbott et al. (2021) “facilitated the establishment of and supported professional reading groups 

in nine adult [English as a second language] ESL programs” (p. 3), and after five years with 

more than 70 participants, they found that “despite the challenges reported, reading group 

involvement promoted reflection, confirmed current professional practices, fostered learning, 

impacted practice, emphasized the importance of professional development, and encouraged 

networking” (p. 3). (For more on these reading groups, see Lee & Abbott, 2021, and Abbott & 

Lee, 2022)  

 

What Can We Do About These Problems in Classroom Language Education Research? 

 

We have, so far, identified and discussed three problems with classroom-based language-

teaching learning research and the publications that result. To start with the first problem, a 

recent, powerful example of “doing-research-with” rather than “doing-research-on” was 

published in June 2023 in the TESOL Journal (which is published by the TIA). The article is 

titled, “Podcasting for Peace: Resettled Refugee Youths’ Self-Sponsored Counter-Storytelling 

Practices,” and the first author is Professor Megan Heise at the Indiana University of 

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Pennsylvania. However, the second author, Asifa Hassan, is not a university professor, but one 

of “the four young refugee women between the ages of 17 and 23 resettled in Germany ... who 

created a multimodal, English-language podcast during the pandemic called ‘Now You Hear Us’ 

(NYHU) (Youth Unmuted, 2020)” (Heise & Hasan, 2023, p. 1). According to the “About Us” 

page of the “Youth Unmuted” website, their vision is of: “A world in which the voice of every 

young person is elevated and valued, enabling youth to act as agents of change within their own 

lives and communities.” They described their mission as “Empowering Youth” based on the 

belief that “every young person deserves to be heard, particularly those who are marginalized 

and have been forgotten by global audiences. We seek to empower these young people and 

elevate their voices by creating an online platform to showcase their creativity, and share their 

voices with the world.” The first of the NYHU podcasts was launched on YouTube in July 2020, 

and as of November 2023, the 20-minute video (voice only) had been viewed more than 600 

times. This short (four-page) paper by Heise and Hasan shows that equal-partnership 

collaborations can take place, not only between professional researchers and classroom teachers 

but also, in this case, between the English as an additional language (EAL) students themselves 

and university-based researchers. However, such researcher-teacher collaborations are still rare, 

as, for example, almost all of the 50+ authors of papers published in the first three 2023 issues of 

the TESOL Journal in 2023 (up to and including September 2023) are university professors. 

 

 There is currently little that can be done about the second problem identified, the PoP 

problem—at least, not until universities stop relying on “research output” as a key criterion for 

employment, promotion, tenure, awarding of research grants, etc. However, a step in the right 

direction would be for some of the most influential universities to recognize publications of the 

kind that are not usually counted. For example, all of the interest sections of the TIA and all of 

the special interest groups of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign 

Language (IATEFL) regularly publish newsletters, which contain shorter articles that are more 

practically oriented, written in more accessible language, and which can be read by busy 

classroom language teachers with limited time. Similarly, the TIA has approximately 100 

affiliates all over the world, most of which also publish newsletters of the kind described above. 

Douglas (2016, 2017, 2019) has written extensively about how journals such as this BC TEAL 

Journal can help bridge the on-going gap between everyday foreign/English language teaching 

and learning and the mostly university-based communities of professors. For example, in the 

inaugural issue the editor stated that the journal “aligns with BC TEAL’s mission statement and 

commitment to support research and encourage professional development throughout the 

province” (Douglas, 2016, p. i). For more details on addressing this particular challenge, see 

“Free and Open Access: How English Language Teaching Associations Can Foster the 

Dissemination of Knowledge Through Scholarly Journals,” (Douglas, 2017); “Scholar-

Practitioners Contributing to the English as an Additional Language Teaching and Learning 

Community’s Knowledge Resources,” (Douglas, 2019), and “Publishing Across the Affiliate 

Lines: TESOL Journals in Conversation,” (Alatriste et al., 2020). More examples of recent and 

relevant work are Smythe et al.’s (2021) paper on “inventive pedagogies and social solidarity” in 

relation to “the work of community-based adult educators during COVID-19 in British 

Columbia” (p. 9). There is also the work of Macintyre Latta et al. (2017), who brought together a 

community to “form the workings of the renewed teacher education program at UBC Okanagan, 

purposefully bringing practitioners and researchers together and, thus, theory and practice 

together” (p. 32). And in relation to this particular opinion piece, it is especially interesting that 

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Macintyre Latta et al. (2017) stated clearly and concisely: “The separation of practitioners from 

researchers, theory from practice, is documented for over 100 years in the research literature as 

being unproductive” (p. 32). 

 

 In addition to the work of Douglas (2016, 2017, 2019) and others in British Columbia, 

many other practically-oriented and teacher-friendly articles are published in journals such as the 

TESL Canada Journal. For example, Katari reported (2018) on the “efficacy of academic 

reading strategy instruction among adult English as an additional language students” in British 

Columbia, which aimed to “address the practical concerns of academic English teaching 

professionals regarding the use of reading strategies while providing action research practitioners 

with suggestions to implement. implemented in the future” (p. 78). And the interest in bridging 

the gaps between research and classroom practice continues to this day. For example, Resch and 

Schrittesser (2023) used service-learning “to bridge the gap between theory and practice in 

teacher education” (p. 1118) in the Austrian context, and in the Pakistani context, Anwer and 

Reiss (2023) presented the views of “expert researchers in the field” on “linking research and 

practice in education” p. 326). All of these articles show that, in spite of pressures to publish in 

so-called “top-tier” journals that are rarely read by anyone expect other (university) researchers, 

it is perfectly possible to publish articles that are of practical use to busy classroom teachers, 

even if they are not as highly regarded within the narrow confines of Academia.  

 

 Another step in the right direction would be for universities to go beyond their usual 

measures of the “impact” of the journals they recognize, which is usually based on how many 

times articles in a particular journal are cited in other articles/journals by other researchers. For 

example, the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Research Guide explains that: “The impact 

factor (IF) is a measure of the frequency with which the average article in a journal has been 

cited in a particular year. It is used to measure the importance or rank of a journal by calculating 

the times its articles are cited.” However, this kind of impact measurement only counts 

researcher-to-researcher information exchange, which may only exacerbate the problem of 

researchers claiming to be writing for a wider audience, but in reality, mainly/only writing for 

other researchers. Likewise, the number of times a particular article has been downloaded says 

nothing about who read the article, but again, it is most likely to be other researchers working in 

the same or similar areas. However, if, for example, a TIA or IATEFL newsletter article was 

read by hundreds of teachers in dozens of countries (which would not be unusual), is that not an 

impact worth at least taking into account? 

 

 The third problem identified was the fact that research findings and output, especially in 

the form of published papers in academic journals, are not “trickling down” back into classrooms 

in ways that benefit teachers and students. That problem is partly a by-product of the first two 

problems: researchers writing for each other (whatever they may claim about their broader 

readership) and the PoP problem, in which researchers are under pressure to publish as much as 

they can as quickly as they can, especially pre-tenure (in tertiary education systems which are 

tenure-track based). And although there are some examples of professorial and non-professorial 

co-authored articles, those are still rare, and more professional researcher-classroom teacher co-

authoring and co-presenting would help to address that third problem. Maybe, one day, there will 

be editors of academic journals, books, and book series who spend most of their time teaching 

K–12 students in schools. However, the time required to be such an editor, and the time required 

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to be a classroom teacher, are currently too much for any individual. But it is possible to 

envisage an arrangement in which, for example, a special issue of a journal focused on classroom 

foreign/English teaching and learning invited some classroom teachers—maybe those who 

provided the data on which the publications in the special issue are based—to be guest co-

editors. 

 

 In the meantime, here are some low-key, low-tech, low-cost things that I have been doing 

for many years now, but which often appear to have been greatly appreciated by the teachers 

who helped me, although not usually within the traditional university system. In addition to co-

authoring published articles and co-presenting with classroom teachers at conferences, I write an 

official (on university letterhead) thank you letter to the teachers who allowed me to be in their 

classes, and/or who gave me permission to (and helped to) gather the classroom data on which 

any publication of mine is based. I also send an official thank you letter to the school principals 

(a copy of which is sent to the teachers) and write a simple thank you card to the students, which 

the teachers share with them. And depending on the context and the publication, it is possible to 

include, at the end of the published paper, a brief acknowledgment and thanks, not to the 

particular school(s) involved (to preserve anonymity) but to the school district. Also, when I 

have been allowed to gather data from classrooms that are short on school supplies, such as 

papers, pencils, pens, notebooks, etc., to show my appreciation, I buy some of those supplies for 

those teachers and learners (sometimes using research funding, but at other times, funded out of 

my own pocket). And again, depending on the context, I offer to take some of the school teachers 

(and their colleagues) who helped me somewhere local for a simple meal, usually lunch, but if 

we are celebrating, then a dinner is usually in order. As noted above, none of these ways of 

giving back and showing our appreciation are high-profile, high-tech, or expensive (in monetary 

terms). Indeed, when I review grant applications in our field, asking for hundreds of thousands, 

or even millions, of Canadian dollars in funding—based on published research using data from 

classroom teachers and learners—whatever the costs of these kinds of things is negligible by 

comparison. These are just some examples of the ways in which researchers can help classroom 

teachers and their learners feel appreciated, respected, and included, in ways that are practical 

and meaningful. 

 

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