The purpose of this project is to measure students’ academic writing development in Spanish as they move from Elementary to Advanced Spanish. Learning Spanish at the college level is a challenging and intense experience that requires students to process an immense array of concepts and content in a short time. In a semester (4 months) students go from learning the basic greetings in the language to being able to write a 2-3 page film review/critique entirely in Spanish. This writing task is also completed in Elementary Spanish II, Intermediate Spanish I and II, and subsequently in Advanced Spanish courses. Students’ engagement with this writing genre throughout their acquisition of Spanish as a foreign language provides an excellent opportunity to study academic literacy development. Given the importance of developing academic literacy for educational and professional purposes, L2 academic literacy development has been the focus of various recent studies (Byrnes & Maxim, 2004; Byrnes, 2006; Byrnes & Ortega, 2008; Byrnes, Weger-Guntharp & Sprang, 2006; Colombi, 1997, 2002, 2003, Schleppegrell & Colombi, 2002). The work of Byrnes, in particular, is of great importance given its longitudinal nature with its focus on measuring student academic literacy development from their first semester of German as a foreign language to their last. As with Byrnes and the other scholars’ research, the proposed study will use the tools of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as developed by M.A.K. Halliday to measure students’ academic literacy development. In my position as the sole Spanish instructor, I have been able to collect student writing samples over these three semesters which through the appropriate IRB approval and informed consent from the students can easily be turned into the data sources for this project. The study of academic literacy in this context would contribute to scholarship on and teaching of academic literacy internationally, especially among multilingual learners as most of our students are.