A new approach to second language writing research should take into account the discursive formation and transformation of students identities by focusing on how students create, interpret, appropriate, resist, or negotiate cultural and linguistic norms in cross-cultural writing. She has also been a teacher educator for ESL and foreign languages. Her research interests include issues of culture in second language teaching, multicultural education, and critical pedagogy. She currently teaches in the School of Education and the Curriculum in Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Controversies polarize around repression versus expression, individual voice versus conventionalized pattern, imitative play versus contextual realpolitik, specific guidelines versus general principles, and cultural subordination versus cultural resistance.
Recent work confirms the contested nature of the theoretical ground.
Reasons for this include the public nature of many research genres, the established evaluative processes that adjudicate them, and student capacity to assess the appropriacy of any advice offered. John M. Swales is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan, where he was also Director of the English Language Institute from 1985 to 2000. In Winter 2000 he was the Velux Visiting Professor in the English Department at the Business School in Aarhus, Denmark. His current interests include genre theory, NNS writing, textual silence, and corpus linguistics.