New trends in language teaching have resulted in a move towards research in the language classroom. For a long time, language teachers tried to train language learners who had a near native command of the language they learned. However, most of these efforts at training proficient learners were not as successful as expected. Scholars attributed this failure to language teachers' confidence in language teaching methods. An "alternative to method," rather than alternative method, was what was needed in the language classroom. Hence, the era of classroom-centered research began--the aim of which was to reassign teacher plausibility to language teachers. As time passed, classroom-centered research was accompanied by a sister approach to classroom research, which was called classroom process research. In addition, qualitative research also gained some reputation in this context. This paper provides a brief overview of classroom research, which reveals three distinct but interrelated research paradigms: classroom-centered research, classroom process research, and qualitative research.