Abstract This article offers a state‐of‐the‐art, critical discussion of teacher research as characterized in TESOL, applied linguistics, and wider educational literatures. We offer a reconceptualization of teacher research that recognizes teacher priorities and perspectives as distinct from academic ones. Four continua are proposed to enable teachers to locate and validate their own research activities on a spectrum ranging from researching‐in‐practice to research‐on‐practice , allowing for a wider range of inquiry‐oriented activities to be recognized as teacher research than previously conceptualized. Several examples of teacher research are provided (including from TESOL Quarterly ) to illustrate how the framework may be employed. The article concludes by proposing four future tasks that, we argue, will revitalize teacher research as a form of inquiry in its own right (and not subservient to academic norms), thereby enabling it to be better recognized as central to TESOL teacher development and expertise in the twenty‐first century.
Anderson et al. (2026) studied this question.