Evolving the TESOL Teaching–Research Nexus

This paper makes further calls for more TESOL research to be conducted in the teaching-research nexus; specifically, for the research to be more grounded in classroom-contexts, and for methods to be more transparent about the messiness of doing real-world classroom research. I present two key calls for TESOL researchers: 1) to collaborate with teachers and ensure research questions are driven by practice-based problems; and 2) to report classroom research by being honest about the messinesss of their real-world data. The desired outcome of these calls is more transparency in research, resulting ideally in a better balance of teaching-informed research and research-informed teaching, and potentially the development of what some refer to as the ‘holistic academic’, referring to researchers who can shift easily within a range of relevant identities: including a researcher, teacher, and manager.