Anglophone universities have increasingly become contact zones for the growing numbers of ethnolinguistically diverse students who use English as a lingua franca (Jenkins, 2014). Despite the sociolinguistic reality of English as contact language, monolingual and monoglossic ideologies often prevail not only at the macro institutional scale, but also at the individual learner scale. By idealizing native English speakers, regarding English as uniform, and viewing writing instruction as a means to reduce linguistic difference, ESL learners can perpetuate the sort of dominant ideologies that critical language pedagogies seek to disrupt. Building upon previous learner belief research, this practitioner-led comparative case study explores the expressed language ideologies and language socialization experiences of two first-year Chinese undergraduates who were participants in a developmental writing course in a Northeastern University in the US. Despite learning about critical language awareness (CLA) pedagogy (Fairclough, 1992), results show that the students expressed a range of dominant and critical language ideologies which were connected to a configuration of micro and macro contextual factors beyond the course. We conclude with implications of these results for critical language pedagogy within writing courses.