Making reference to the prior eminent literature helps academics to establish an intertextual link to the wider discipline. And such link could be utilized to justify their arguments and the novelty of their position, since it connects their "research activities to significant work in the field" (Hyland, 2002, p.115). It is therefore pivotal to equip novice ESL/EFL writers with the essential skill. This article aims to provide ESL/EFL writers a clear image of how phraseological pattern of the

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... porting clause correlates to reporting verb functions, and provide them a model pattern of most frequently and typically used reporting syntactic structures. In this way, not only may it facilitate novice writer"s interpreting skill in reading academic papers, but also, beyond that, raise their syntactic consciousness of structuring an appropriate reporting clause. To this end, this article first examines 50 published research papers in the area of applied linguistics, and with the aid of the software AntConc a corpus of reporting statements will be generated. Then to give the readers a small taste of the kinds of findings this research project might yield, a brief preliminary analysis of a small sample of the data has been conducted. The findings show that there seems to be a causal relationship between the function carried by the reporting verb and the phraseological pattern of the reporting clause. Corresponding syntactic forms of reporting speech (e.g. "V that", "it be V-ed that", integral, and non-integral) are strategically employed, by an expert writer, to either strengthen the evaluative function, or mitigate it.