Joan Cutting is a Senior Lecturer in TESOL in the University of Edinburgh. She has worked in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Guangdong, Nanning, Hefei, Chongqin, Nanjing, Shanghai, Changchun, Tianjin and Beijing. Her research interests are Chinese learners, vague language, the codes of academic discourse communities, spoken grammar and teacher training.

She designed corpus-based online English language learning materials for airport groundstaff, in a European Commission Leonardo project entitled ¡®ELSY: Devising a Multi-media Airport Syllabus for Young People who are Unemployed and Under-qualified¡¯. She is researching the needs of Chinese postgraduate students in UK universities.?

She is editor of The Grammar of Spoken English and its Application to English for Academic Purposes (University of Sunderland 1999) and Vague Language Explored (Palgrave 2007), and author of Analysing the Language of Discourse Communities (Elsevier Science 2000) and Pragmatics and Discourse (Routledge 2002, 2008).