Four classes of ninth-grade students in an international school in East Asia used a set of web-based technology tools to evaluate two competing webpages about the Taiwan Straits. The findings highlight the ways these students developed disciplinary literacy in social studies by drawing upon cultural resources and contextual knowledge as they responded to and evaluated the claims and evidence within the two texts. Implications of this work point to the potential benefits of educators being more explicit about the relationship between metacognitive reading strategies and the metadiscursive skills that are part of the social studies. A related implication for practice is the need to guide students in discussing, comparing, and contrasting the cultural and contextual knowledge they use to make sense of different texts. (Contains 3 tables.)