Inquiry points out that immigrant and refugee students benefit from use of their native languages in education. This small-scale, exploratory project used an innovative, five-day critical media literacy curricular unit, and then explored how it served as a context for native language and English literacy development. Participants were 14 adolescent newcomers to the U.S. from Somalia, Kenya, Djibouti, and Ethiopia, all speakers of Somali with restricted or interrupted formal schooling experiences. Participants had diverging but mostly beginning levels of print literacy skills; yet as recent migrants, most employed social media to interact with others locally and globally, in multiple languages, oral and written. As described here, attempts to promote peer-to-peer Somali language communication ended in multilingual interaction across a range of social and academic goals in the classroom. These research findings point out how in-class use of social media assay can serve to attain multilingual and (critical) literacy learning aims.