The early success of the revised ESL literacy development curriculum for international undergraduates at a large Midwestern university suggests that a curriculum which integrates reading and writing activity around meaning-making tasks with texts and focuses on fluency before accuracy is preferable to a skill-based curriculum. Support for this approach is found both in first and second language literacy development research, yet it has not been widely adopted in ESL developmental writing programs. Although only in the second year of implementation, test scores, grades, and student and teacher interviews indicate the revised curriculum is well-serving the developmental academic literacy needs of these matriculated ESL international students. Students are demonstrating reading and writing with greater ease and speed. They understand and produce texts with greater rhetorical awareness and have developed strategies for talking about and working with a variety of academic text-types. The development of these literacy practices has been well-received by teachers and students, and has prepared the latter to participate successfully in the required first year composition course. (Contains 2 tables.)