Sue is interested in all sorts of written discourse analysis to the extent that this can facilitate understanding, and sometimes change, in the social situation of which it is a part. She has looked at the discursive construction of (written) identity in a number of educational and professional contexts e.g. teacher education and social work. She works with a range of discourse analytical methods (macro and micro) and softwares (SketchEngine, Wordsmith, UAM) with a particular interest in small corpora and ways of combining quantitative and qualitative corpus work. Sue supervises research students working on a range of language analysis based projects. She is convenor of the Professional and Academic Discourse research group in the Centre for Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick.

Sue joined the Centre for Applied Linguistics in 2004. Before this, she spent ten years at Aston University in Birmingham. She has also worked on examination administration and development at the London University exam board, and worked as an English Language teacher and teacher trainer in Mexico, France, Spain and UK.