Exploring multilingual writers in secondary education: insights from a trilingual corpus

Abstract This study aims at contributing to the field of multilingual writing and providing evidence for Cummins’ Common Underlying Proficiency Hypothesis (CUP) through analysing trilingual writing among secondary education students enrolled in a Basque immersion program. The main objective of the present study is to explore the relationships between participants’ compositions in their three languages of schooling (Basque, Spanish and English). A trilingual corpus of argumentative scientific writing essays was collected from a sample of 113 secondary education students. The texts were analysed with MultiAzterTest to retrieve complexity, accuracy and fluency measures. Correlational analyses were performed to explore correlations of each measure across languages, and low-moderate correlations were found between most measures and their counterparts. Specifically, accuracy and fluency measures showed stronger between-language relationships, which were especially salient between Basque and Spanish. Findings suggest that multilingual learners exhibit similar across-language patterns in the writing process, thus supporting Cummins’ CUP. The emerging similarities have important implications for bi/multilingual education programs, as they might inform curriculum design and instruction to foster crosslinguistic transfer and metalinguistic multilingual awareness.