This article aims to reflect on experience as a research construct in applied linguistics research on classroom foreign language teaching and learning in Brazil. The motivation for investigating experiences provides the rationale for a survey on the reference to experience in the titles and abstracts of articles published from 2000 to 2005. This is followed by a review of the meaning of experience in philosophy and cognitive sciences and of the research which refer to experience. A discussion of its importance and implications for an epistemology for classroom foreign language teaching is followed by suggestions of further research on teachers' and students' experiences so as to reveal the processes and dynamics associated to them aiming for meaning, change and transformation in the language classroom as well as a new boost on classroom language learning and teaching research.