Language and Education

Beyond the L2: Multilingual Writing in Education

In recent decades, research on writing has flourished across diverse educational contexts. However, writing from a multilingual perspective remains significantly underexplored, particularly when moving beyond the dominant focus on English as an L2. Today’s multilingual classrooms demand an approach that considers the full linguistic repertoires of learners, including majority, minority, heritage, regional, and additional languages (Cenoz & Gorter, 2014). Considering the pivotal role of writing in education (Manchón & Polio, 2021), this shift towards a multilingual perspective requires rethinking how writing is conceptualised, taught, and assessed across multiple languages in real educational settings. In fact, it is widely understood that learners’ academic skills, including writing, may probably be positively transferred across one’s languages, suggesting the existence of a unified or integrated construct of multilingual writing (Rinnert & Kobayashi, 2016; Usanova & Schnoor, 2022). In line with Cummins’ (1980) claims, specific instructional and contextual conditions need to be met so that positive transfer occurs; however, empirical foundations in the case of writing still require further data-based evidence. In fact, specific aspects of multilingual writing still need to be studied with larger sample sizes and adopting various perspectives, both of which are of critical importance in multilingual writing research (Gogolin et al., 2022).

Despite growing interest in bilingual and integrated language-content programmes, such as CLIL, immersion, and bilingual education, writing has often remained peripheral in these contexts or has been examined exclusively through the lens of English. In addition, while the influence of individual differences in (second language) writing or writing development has been extensively researched from a second language perspective, there is still a scarcity of studies that investigate how multilingual writing develops and functions in more than one language. This might shed light on differential or parallel trajectories (Arias-Hermoso et al., 2025; Durrant et al., 2021; Granados et al., 2022) or on the influence of key variables, such as instructional models, individual differences, language exposure, or learners’ sociolinguistic profiles (Guzmán-Alcón, 2025). Moreover, writing in more than one language in infant, primary, and secondary levels—where multilingual foundations are formed—remains particularly understudied.

This Special Issue aims to address this gap by examining multilingual writing from educational perspectives. It offers a platform for rethinking writing not just as an L2 skill, but as a multilingual literacy practice embedded in curricular, cognitive, and sociolinguistic realities.

Rationale and Aims

This Special Issue seeks to contribute to ongoing conversations about literacy, language learning, and education by offering new insights into how writing develops and is shaped across two or more languages in bi/multilingual contexts and programs. It builds on and responds to the following needs:

• To expand research beyond L2/FL writing, exploring multilingual writing inclusive of L1/L3/Lx.
• To overcome the English-centric focus of most writing studies by including LOTEs (languages other than English), particularly regional, minoritised, and heritage languages.
• To examine how instructional models such as bilingual education, immersion, and CLIL impact learners’ writing in multiple languages.

By doing so, the Special Issue aims to:

• Showcase research on multilingual writing across diverse educational settings and sociolinguistic contexts.
• Highlight the role of writing in supporting both language development and the acquisition of subject knowledge, emphasising the interplay between language and content, particularly in bi/multilingual programmes (including, but not limited to, CLIL, CBI, immersion, etc).
• Contribute to a more nuanced understanding of multilingual literacy trajectories and support the development of pedagogical practices that foster writing across languages and disciplines.