Guest Lecture by John Swales, Professor Emeritus of the University of Michigan, USA

John Swales, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA, conducted a lecture titled “Citational Practice: From Parenthetical Plonking to Intertextual Storytelling” at the invitation of the Department of English on the 29th of October, 2014.

Prof. Swales was Director of the University of Michigan’s English Language Institute from 1987 to 2001, and has been a prolific writer since 1971, publishing many books and journal articles in his primary areas of research, genre analysis and academic discourse. His widely popular Academic Writing for Graduate Students, co-authored with Chris Feak, which specifically targets non-native speakers of English, is now in its 3rd edition. Professor Swales’ work in academic writing covers a variety of disciplines including science, medicine, humanities and law.

The lecture which was followed by an engaging discussion, was well attended by an audience of English Department students and academic staff, as well as academic staff from other Departments of the University of Colombo and from the University of Kelaniya and the Post Graduate Institute of English.