Although there have been many studies comparing native and non-native researchers, few of those studies have been on the use of reporting verbs by Turkish EFL researchers. The purpose of this study is to investigate (1) the most frequently used reporting verbs by native and non-native researchers in ELT and functional and positional differences in the use of these reporting verbs, (2) if there are any overused reporting verbs in non-native ELT research articles with reference to native ELT research articles and (3) if there are any differences between native and nonnative ELT research articles in terms of the syntactic patterning of the first three overused reporting verbs. To shed light on these research questions, two corpora of 160 ELT research articles published in peer-reviewed, international journals in the field of language teaching were compiled and analyzed. Out of these 160 research articles, 80 of them were written by non-native researchers, and the other 80 articles were written by their native counterparts. The findings indicated that some reporting verbs, like "revealed," "indicated" and "observed" are overused by non-native researchers. Also, there are some differences in the use of reporting verbs in terms of syntactic patterning between the two corpora. The results of the study may help non-native researchers improve their academic writing skills.