The authors of this essay discuss the impact of corpus collection and analysis on the writing program at The City College of New York, CUNY, the digital literacies encouraged by the corpus collection process, and how corpus studies can be used to support genre awareness and build communities of practice in basic writing classrooms and among graduate students. New graduate student instructors collected the corpus of student essays and later used it in their classrooms to both introduce and reinforce what students already know about rhetorical moves and genre conventions. Since these corpus-based assignments were derived from our own student writers, they showed our graduate students what our undergraduate students already knew about academic writing and helped these first-year writers build upon that knowledge--the assignments showed them, visually, the kind and frequency of rhetorical moves of the argument essay in an academic community of practice. The corpus collection and analysis process provided new graduate student instructors with hands-on experience in one strand of composition research. As they began the process of learning to teach academic discourse to basic writers, English language learners, and other students of composition, they were also actively learning the discursive practices and analytical modes of composition researchers.