In Systemic Functional Linguistics，the APPRAISAL theory regards concession as one of the engagement resources.Moving away from descriptions of concessive connectives solely in terms of textual relations this study describes their in terpersonal metafunction，especially their role as sourcing resources in English academic reviews based on the APPRAISAL theory．Linguistic resources of concession have been categorized and the findings show that concessive conjunctions and concessive conjuncts account for most of the concessives in the corpus，while the association of attitudinal disjuncts and concessive conjunctions or concessive conjuncts bears more interpersonal meanings． Concession is treated as a type of attribution which reflects interactions between participants and achieves dialogistic effects; at the same time，the study also proposes that concessives as engagement resources have different effects in different contents expressed by concessions． It is hoped that the present study will give some enlightenments to the writing of English academic reviews．