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.

The purpose of this study is to examine the function and spread of English in Korean academic society by investigating the use of English in writing dissertations. To this end, this study selected one of the universities in Korea and attempted to identify to what extent English has been used in master"s and doctoral dissertations for the last 12 years. The results show that the use of English in writing both master"s and doctoral dissertations has increased gradually and there exists a discrepancy among the fields of study. The results also reveal that a number of dissertations in the fields of natural science, engineering and medical science have been written in English recently. The comparison of the results of this study and some related analyses in European universities indicates a similar trend of English use in academic fields. Understanding the current use of English in Koreanacademic society can lead to a better understanding of the role and function of English in Korea as a whole.