Although the Common Core state standards' goal of ensuring that every student leaves high school prepared to meet the demands of college and career is laudable, it's daunting for teachers who serve English language learners. The authors, educators at a private bilingual school in Mexico, describe how they used short excerpts of longer works giving pro and con opinions on compelling issues to engage their native Spanish-speaking middle school students and help them become familiar with the rhetorical approach and style of informational texts written in English. Excerpts were downloaded from ProCon.org, a nonprofit that presents such excerpts for educators' use. Silva and colleagues created five tasks aligned to five reading skills their students needed: identifying support for main ideas, detecting bias, distinguishing arguments from counterarguments, evaluating arguments, and drawing conclusions. Students worked through each task with three compelling topics-value of social networking sites, whether tablets should replace textbooks in schools, and whether drinking milk is healthy. They learned strategies as they tackled argumentative texts in a second language.