The present study investigates the use of signaling nouns (SNs) in published and Korean graduate student academic writing in applied linguistics. A set of 35 nouns was examined for their frequency as SNs, while the six most frequent SNs in published writing were subjected to detailed analyses of realization patterns. The results indicated that the nouns function as SNs in fifteen percent of the time of their total use and that students overall used a greater number of SNs than did published authors. Despite considerable overlap in the most frequent SNs, there was evidence that students rely on a narrower range of SNs than published writers. Published authors were differentiated from students in employing more anaphoric SNs, which contributed to cohesiveness and organization of text through the effective encapsulation of the preceding stretch of discourse. This study challenges the previous claim that the frequency of SNs positively correlates with the writing proficiency. Some pedagogical implications are drawn for academic writing instruction.