Adopting Biber's multifunctional-multidimensional approach, this paper explores a coherent set of linguistic features for the expression of involvement in different registers, using The Tswana Learner English Corpus (TLEC) and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Student Essays (LOCNESS). As a set, the TLEC and LOCNESS show many similarities to academic writing, but the student writing differs in that it also reveals similarities with spoken rather than with other written registers.