Alastair taught mainly in the postgraduate courses in the area of TESOL and Applied Linguistics, and coordinated and taught Global Englishes (013095), which looks at the implications of the global spread of English, reasons why English has spread so widely, issues around linguistic imperialism, language rights, linguistic genocide, and the maintenance of global inequality, the emergence of new varieties of English, English as a lingua franca, and global Englishes in the classroom, including questions of standardization and intelligibility, issues around native and nonnative teachers, and questions of appropriate pedagogy and evaluation.

Alastair also supervised a considerable number of doctoral students on a range of topics in the field of language studies, including the interrelationships between English, popular culture and identity in Greece, Brunei and Mongolia; auto ethnography of hyphenated lives; English language teaching practices and identity in Japan; the development of bilingual identities among young Koreans studying in Australia; and switches in the medium of instruction in Hong Kong.