This report builds on our previous research on multilingual young people's reading engagement by focusing on multilingual young people’s writing. We used data from our 2021 Annual Literacy Survey from 117 schools in the UK.
Our findings show that:
- More multilingual young people are engaged writers:
- 39.5% of multilingual young people said they enjoy writing, compared with 29.9% of their monolingual peers.
- 2 in 5 (41.2%) multilinguals said that they write every day or a couple of times a week compared with nearly 1 in 3 (31.6%) monolingual young people.
- More multilingual young people feel positive about writing, with more of them saying that writing is cool compared with their monolingual peers (37.0% vs. 25.1%). Half (50.1%) also said that they carry on writing even when they find it difficult compared with just over 2 in 5 (43.0%) monolingual young people.
- More multilingual young people than their monolingual peers said that they engage in writing as a form of self-expression. For example, more of them said they write because it helps them feel more creative (55.7% vs. 45.6%), express their ideas and imagination (52.9% vs. 42.6%) and their thoughts and feelings (47.0% vs. 39.0%).