This article is concerned with a group of language teachers' reading and interpretation of a peer-reviewed journal article. It draws empirical materials from a larger study, which explored how teachers addressed the 'crises' of representation, legitimation and praxis in educational research. In this article, I present a subset of data to illustrate how some of the participants responded to the crisis of praxis. I describe the participants' interpretive work as ways of reading, and discuss how these "ways of reading" constitute an imaginative-ethical approach to reading research. Such an approach, it is argued, holds the potential to interrupt the dominant instrumental model of research use. Throughout the article, a case is made for understanding how teachers read and interpret research-based recommendations in keeping with their local contexts and professional commitment.