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This paper compares the linguistic features found in undergraduate theses written by students coming from different linguistic backgrounds and contexts, a native-English (Honours) and an Indonesian student. It reports a part of a study investigating ways students construct and negotiate interpersonal meanings to establish and maintain interpersonally oriented argumentation throughout the various stages in their theses. The study is underpinned by theories of APPRAISAL and of genre pedagogy of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). However, this paper merely explains the ways students employ linguistic choices to establish discipline-related meanings, engage with others and assume authority. The data involve resources in the level of discourse semantic and are analyzed through ATTITUDE, ENGAGEMENT and GRADUATION systems. The Honours student tends to employ the resources in developed ways. Complex negotiations with external sources overlay her text in “bringing in”, evaluating, and integrating them in developing her arguments. In contrast, the Indonesian student seems to pay little attention to the resources and merely report what she did in her research. External sources tend simply to support her argument without evaluating them critically. Accordingly, Indonesian students need to be explicitly exposed to and taught the ways to engage with external sources and deploy them appropriately. Introduction This paper forms a part of a larger research project. The project itself aims to understand how students coming from different linguistic backgrounds and contexts diversely establish and maintain interpersonally oriented argumentation throughout the various stages of their thesis. It denotes a more pedagogical motivation as it has been based on a concern that students in the Indonesian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) context experience difficulties in bringing in and negotiating with others in their academic texts. The project is generally divided into two parts: seeing writing as negotiation–the application of the interpersonal language for negotiating meanings and as stage goal-oriented argumentation—adoption of the academic genre. The data were taken from two theses written by an Honours student from an Australian university and a high-graded student from an Indonesian university (English department). These texts were analyzed to see how they differ in developing argumentation throughout the stages of the theses genre. The analysis has been shaped by the theory of APPRAISAL (Martin, 2000; Martin & White, 2005; White, 2003) and of genre-pedagogy (Martin, 1992, 2009; Martin & Rose, 2007; Rose, 2006). However, this paper discusses merely a half of the project. It compares the use of interpersonal language in negotiating stance towards the material they write, the readers whom they communicate, and other writers who hold those positions (Martin & White, 2005; White, 2003) throughout the texts. It aims particularly at explaining how the two students differ in making use of the resources to establish discipline-related meanings, engage with others and assume authority. It deals with how students as prospective members of an academic community negotiate meanings to generate new knowledge. This means that they begin to join a new discourse community—a group of people observing and sharing certain conventions and expectations, and negotiating meanings within these conventions and expectations to pursue the same goals (Borg, 2003; Lee, 2006; Swales, 1990). Here, each student has to take on new roles and to engage with knowledge in new ways (Hood, 2004, 2010; Hyland & Hamp-Lyons, 2002). This negotiation—the ‘dialogue’, requires students to observe the norms of the community. So, in the context of the current study, writing theses is essentially responding to what others have previously written (Martin & White, 2005; White, 1998), within certain academic norms and expectations. However, in the context of novice writers, the case often becomes a real problem, as they sometimes do not observe the contextually specific requirements the academic community has established (Lee, 2006). In the Indonesian context, the problem becomes even worse. Entering higher education often means adopting and adapting a new way of learning. Writing subject has even become nightmare, for both students and tutors. These indicate how demanding English academic writing for non-native speaker of English are. Academic writing: reporting or (and) negotiating There has been a change in the view of academic writing. It was often portrayed as a compilation of clauses and clause-complexes, which are usually impersonal. They represented none but the truth and/or facts found in research. Student writers were commonly trained to detach themselves from what they wrote. Many academic references suggested students to write academically unbiased, informational and impersonal (Hyland, 1994). However, during the last three decades or so, there have been general considerations on how academic
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