The wide adoption of the new Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in the U.S. has increased expectations for all teachers to prepare all learners to read and write in academic ways. More knowledge is needed about instructional approaches that may lead adolescent English learners (ELs) to meet this goal. Developing academic literacy practices represents an acute challenge for adolescent ELs. This article describes an eight‐week instructional unit in a U.S. urban public high school that investigated the effectiveness of using the genre‐based Reading to Learn approach to support 20 adolescent ELs in learning to write academic‐style persuasive essays. Results indicated a statistically significant increase from pretest to posttest in the participants' effective use of the linguistic resources that function to create persuasion in an academic way. These findings suggest that the Reading to Learn approach may be one way to support adolescent ELs in developing academic literacy practices.