This article presents the case for using a critical literacy approach to enhance the freshman composition experience for second language writers. As our classrooms become more multilingual and multicultural with each passing semester, we need to move away from thinking of our ESL students as “outliers” and consider them as key participants with specialized linguistic and cultural needs and strengths. Using both published examples and her own experiences, the author illustrates how a critical approach can be advantageous to second- language writers and offers ways such an approach might be implemented in actual practice.