Martin was elected fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1998,[2] and awarded a Centenary Medal for his services to Linguistics and Philology in 2001.

Genres are related and distinguished by recurrent global patterns, such as sequences in time, complicating events, explaining processes, describing things, or arguing for a point of view.

Martin's work on genre initially emerged from educational research from 1979, describing the types of texts that students are expected to write in school.

It has since been expanded by many scholars to map genres across a range of cultural contexts, and is the starting point for analysis of texts and design of literacy education interventions.

[12] Genre pedagogy is based on a principle of 'guidance through interaction in the context of shared experience', influenced by research in child language development by Michael Halliday[13] and Clare Painter.

Sydney School research in genre and discourse semantics outlined above is a foundation of the pedagogy, and associated teacher training programs.

[17] Martin has also been involved in recent years in interdisciplinary works with Karl Maton's Legitimation Code Theory.