Engagement relates to how writers acknowledge the presence of their readers by explicitly bringing them into the discourse. This study examines how master’s theses by Korean graduate students differ from internationally acknowledged journal articles in their engagement practices. Within the specific discipline of applied linguistics, it compares both quantitative and qualitative aspects of engagement resources employed by novice and expert groups. The results indicate that compared with expert writers, Korean graduate students significantly underuse engagement devices. For individual devices and their rhetorical functions, more insightful novice-expert variations were found. Student writers tend to address undefined general audiences quite often, making their texts less-reciprocal and less effective for negotiation with readers. Further, Korean students prefer to deploy less imposing textual directives, rather separated from the main argumentation. Their uses of cognitive directives and questions are also quite confined, and not as strategic as the expert practices. These characteristics provide valuable implications for Korean EAP writing pedagogy.