I am Professor Emeritus of Applied Linguistics at Portland State University. I investigate English grammar and discourse, often with "corpus linguistics" tools (computer-assisted analysis techniques for studying language). My research investigates how people vary their grammar, vocabulary, and organization to fulfill different purposes and meet different audience's expectations. I am especially interested in the writing of different disciplines. As the principal investigator for the Civil Engineering Writing Project , I collaborated with engineering faculty and practitioners to help new civil engineers write more effectively.
Before I retired in 2022, I taught graduate and undergraduate courses in applied linguistics and trained teachers of English as a second/foreign language. Earlier I taught ESL/EFL in the United States, South Korea and Lesotho (southern Africa). I have conducted teacher-training seminars in many countries, including Thailand, Taiwan, Argentina, Chile and Italy. Using my grammar and discourse expertise, I still occasionally act as a consultant for attorneys on legal cases involving language in contracts, regulations, and other documents.
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