Professor Michael Hoey has been Baines Professor of English Language at the University of Liverpool since 1993 and is currently Pro Vice-Chancellor for Internationalisation.

He is a former Dean of Arts (2008-09) and was Director of the Applied English Language studies unit at the university between 1993 and 2003. He is an academician of the Academy of Social Sciences and a member of Council at the University of Chester; he is a member of the Audit and Risk Committees of both organisations. He was for many years chair of the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) English Advisory Committee and of the Religious Studies and Philosophy Advisory Committee, and was a member of AQA’s Education and Training Committee. He also chaired for AQA a working group that designed a new A level in Critical Thinking. He is currently Director of the University of Liverpool's Confucius Institute.

As a linguist he is much published in the fields of discourse analysis, applied linguistics and ELT and corpus linguistics, being the author of five books and co-author of a sixth, the editor or co-editor of two more and the author of over 80 articles.

One of his books ('Patterns of Lexis in Text', 1991) won the Duke of Edinburgh English Speaking Union Award for best book in applied linguistics; another ('Lexical Priming', 2005) was shortlisted for best book in applied linguistics by the British Association of Applied Linguistics.

His applied linguistic research has led to his lecturing in over 40 countries. He is co-editor with Tony McEnery of a series of books on advances in corpus linguistics and chief consultant to Macmillan's Dictionaries, one of which also won a Duke of Edinburgh English Speaking Union Award.