John Malcolm Swales (born 1938) 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.
[1] He was born in 1938 in Reigate, in the south of England, and attended various private schools before going up to Queens' College, Cambridge in 1957, graduating with a degree in psychology.
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.
He returned to the UK in 1978 as a senior lecturer (later reader) in the Language Studies Unit at the University of Aston, where he jointly developed the first master’s course in the teaching of English for Specific Purposes.
His writing on topics such as the concept of discourse community, the relating of descriptive linguistic research to pedagogical uptake, and the design of materials for advanced learners of English, has been influential in many countries around the world.