Research Genres: Explorations and Applications

Cambridge Applied Linguistics

by John M. Swales

This book provides a rich and accessible account of genre studies by a world-renowned applied linguist. The hardback edition discusses today's research world, its various configurations of genres, and the role of English within the genres. Theoretical and methodological issues are explored, with a special emphasis on various metaphors of genre. The book is full of carefully worded detail and each chapter ends with suggestions for pedagogical practice. The volume closes with evaluations of contrastive rhetoric, applied corpus linguistics, and critical approaches to EAP. Research Genres provides a rich and scholarly account of this key area.

Genres: Linguistics, Research

328 pages, Paperback

First published July 28, 2004

About the author

John Malcolm Swales was an English linguist. He joined the University of Michigan as a faculty member in 1985. He retired in 2006 as professor emeritus of linguistics and co-director of the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English project.
Swales was 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. His writing has studied second language acquisition.

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

For academic books, the rating isn't based on whether I like or dislike them, but whether or not I find them useful.

This book is useful to me, and would be useful to anyone interested in genre or in understanding how academic research writing is done. It's also a good resource for anyone teaching upper division and (especially) graduate student writers.