John Swales

Who is John Swales?

John Malcolm Swales is a linguist best known for his work on genre analysis, particularly with regard to its application to the fields of rhetoric, discourse analysis, English for Academic Purposes and, more recently, information science.

He was born in 1938 in Surrey, UK and attended various private schools before going up to Cambridge University in 1957, graduating with a degree in psychology. He first taught in southern Italy for two years, both in a high school and at the local university, and then went to Sweden for a year as an English language teacher. His next move was as an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Libya from 1963-65. After a year studying for an advanced diploma in linguistics and English language teaching at the University of Leeds, UK he returned to Libya as Head of the English Section at the College of Engineering in Tripoli. After three more years at the Leeds Institute of Education, he returned to the Middle East, this time to the prestigious University of Khartoum, Sudan, where he was Director of the English Language Servicing Unit from 1973-1978.