Fostering multilingual writers: A multimodal approach to literacy development in primary education

This study evaluates literacy development in Primary Education, emphasizing the role of innovative, multilingual, and multimodal methodologies like PictoEscritura (PYCTO) in shaping young learners’ writing skills. This research takes place within the multilingual educational context of the Basque Autonomous Community, with both Basque and Spanish as co-official languages and English as the foreign language. Moreover, as students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds become increasingly diverse, understanding how students develop literacy across multiple languages is crucial for fostering inclusive and effective pedagogical strategies. This study analyzes the impact of PYCTO methodology on students’ writing skills, in comparison with those developed by students working within traditional monolingual approaches. Drawing on the data collected from 1639 writings from students in 2nd and 3rd grades in the three languages, analytic and holistic dimensions have been evaluated. Findings suggest that the multilingual methodology enhances students’ writing performance across languages in both analytic and holistic dimensions, although the pattern of improvement varied slightly across grades, languages, and dimensions.