Halliday's first academic position was as assistant lecturer in Chinese, at Cambridge University, from 1954 to 1958. In 1958 he moved to Edinburgh, where he was lecturer in general linguistics until 1960, and reader from 1960 to 1963. From 1963 to 1965 he was the director of the Communication Research Centre at University College, London. During 1964, he was also Linguistic Society of America Professor, at Indiana University. From 1965 to 1971 he was professor of linguistics at UCL. In 1972–73 he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences, Stanford, and in 1973–74 professor of linguistics at the University of Illinois. In 1974 he briefly moved back to Britain to be professor of language and linguistics at Essex University. In 1976 he moved to Australia as foundation professor of linguistics at the University of Sydney, where he remained until he retired in 1987. While at the University of Sydney Halliday founded the Sydney School, a genre-based literacy pedagogy, in 1979 at the Working Conference on Language in Education.