Shell nouns are widely found in academic English writing. With their stance-taking and impersonal functions, research on shell nouns is of great importance. This paper takes English abstracts from engineering journals as the subjects and applies a corpus-based analysis to explore the differences of shell nouns used by native speakers and Chinese learners. It focuses on stance construction and interpersonal interaction in different moves. The results show that shell nouns used by Chinese learners are much less than those by native speakers in the total frequencies, and in each move, there are differences between them in the amount and the interpersonal functions of the shell nouns. In Background move and Purpose move, Chinese learners underuse shell nouns with the function of describing attributes of entities; in Method move and Conclusion move, the amount of shell nouns used by Chinese learners is comparatively less, which indicates that stance construction of shell nouns should be strengthened. The findings contribute to the appropriate use of shell nouns of second language learners and the improvement of their academic writing.