Text analysis as a research direction was introduced to Estonian linguistics in the 1990s. At that time, the focus was predominantly on the qualitative analysis of media texts, but over time both the research material and methodology have diversified. Nowadays, various genre studies set the tone, for example analyzing the communication goals, structure and language of administrative texts, academic texts and Covid-19 restrictions labels. In discourse analysis the focus is currently on gender-marked vocabulary.
Research done in the framework of text analysis supports text-centered mother tongue teaching in both general education and higher education. Process-based text creation and subject literacy have become the main focus at the institute.