In support of the research mission of the University of Michigan, faculty, and staff at the ELI are involved in research and development across a number of areas. These include English for Specific Purposes, applied discourse analysis, genre analysis, grammatical analysis, second language acquisition, language assessment, and pedagogical practice. There is also the Morley Scholarship Fund, which provides financial support for those wishing to carry out research projects related to second language theory and pedagogy, and the Spaan Fellowships, which provide financial support for those wishing to carry out research projects related to second or foreign language assessment and evaluation. The ELI Library also houses an internationally recognized collection of books on linguistics, applied linguistics, language teaching, and assessment in language.

In addition, a major research undertaking has been the development of the Michigan Corpus of Spoken Academic English (MICASE), a 1.7-million-word corpus, which is freely available and searchable on the web. Ongoing research initiatives involving MICASE include discourse and pragmatic research on language functions in academic speech, comparisons of features of academic speech across disciplinary divisions, comparisons between written and spoken academic language, and many other such topics.

The results of these and other investigations are also being used to inform our teaching materials and test development. ELI faculty members have authored a number of applied linguistics texts and increasingly draw on data from MICASE in their revision and in the development of new texts.