This paper reports on an inquiry into the construction of stance in finite reporting that-clauses. The data were drawn from two corpora of academic papers from a journal in the discipline of Applied Linguistics written by different language users： native speakers of English and Chinese writers using English as L2. By drawing on Sindair＇s distinction between ＂averral＂ and ＂attribution,＂ as well as Martin and White＇s notion of extra-vocalization, this paper sets up a framework for analyzing the sources in reporting clauses in order to examine how the writers construe their stances as visible, hedged or concealed. The study found that for self-sourced reports, the L2 writers are inclined to avoid direct self-mention which shows the greatest writer visibility, but instead use hidden averral with internal attribution. As for other-sourced reports, L2 writers prefer reporting verbs which are strong in the strength of attitude to make a much more definite and stronger claim, while native writers tactically use the moderate verbs and boosting expressions to construct more flexible stances. These discrepancies are likely to result from the disciplinary characteristics which are both community-based and context-situated.
