His primary research interest is in the area of discourse studies, especially from a genre-based view. His PhD from the University of Sydney was on a contrastive genre study of newspaper commentaries on 9/11 in China and Australia. He is the author of Genre across Languages and Cultures (VDM, 2007). He also publishes in Discourse Studies, Australian Review of Applied Linguistics and University of Sydney Papers in TESOL. His research interests also include contemporary Chinese discourse studies, second language acquisition and translation studies.