This preliminary study explores how international students bring their cultural knowledge and experiences into relationship with other writers' ideas as they engage in an online discussion in response to a news text. This article focuses on a language excerpt from an online discussion group, including the assignment prompt, reading text, student responses, and comments to one another within a university ESL composition course. An intertextual analysis suggests that students' engagement with multiple texts in this dialogic space and the integration of their own cultural resources led to socially constructed learning, relationship building, and a deepened understanding of the source text. This study extends the conversation in Academic Literacies research by illustrating how the construct can be used as a design frame for teaching an academic practice (writing about text) while also deliberately incorporating ways for students to draw upon their cultural identities and resources.