John studied Applied Linguistics and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) before working as an EAP tutor and instructor at universities in Turkey, China and the UAE. At the UAE University he was the supervisor of Academic Writing Center. He now works in the Centre for Academic Communication in English (CACE), a teaching unit that sits within Oxford Lifelong Learning.
John approaches academic writing as both a set of learnable language resources and a socially situated practice. His teaching therefore aims to make disciplinary expectations and conventional responses explicit while helping students question, negotiate, and adapt those expectations as developing scholars.
His pedagogy genre-based approaches and systemic functional linguistics to show how academic texts make meaning: how language choices construct stance and evaluation, how paragraphs organise logical relations, and how whole texts build argument, evidence, and engagement with sources. Through genre analysis, students move from noticing patterns in authentic texts to producing their own writing with increasing control and flexibility.