The relevance of English as a Second Language (ESL) courses to the "real world" of college writing is an ongoing issue for those who teach ESL. Ideally, ESL composition classes should help students make connections between what they learn about writing and the ways they might need to write later on in their academic careers. Unfortunately, as with regular first year English composition courses, this is not always the case. ESL professors spend much of their preparation time devising syllabi with a wide array of writing assignments to ensure that their students understand the basic elements of writing: organization, coherence, and sentence structure. They do so with the intention of better preparing their students for the types of writing they will be required to do once they enter a full academic program. However, much valuable preparation and classroom time can be spent needlessly on lessons that may not be relevant once students enter their academic course of study. Without knowledge of the discipline-specific writing challenges that their students face once they enter the mainstream course of study, it is easy for ESL teachers, even with the best of intentions, to become insulated and isolated in the world of their own classrooms and department-mandated curriculum. This article describes a study on the types of writing tasks that ESL students commonly encounter in introductory academic courses at a two-year college and discusses how the results of the study may have an impact on instruction. (Contains 6 tables and 1 note.)