Agency in multilingual academic writing: exploring linguistic, semiotic, cultural, and digital resource mobilisation in the writing process

Previous research on multilingual writing has largely prioritised written products, paying less attention to how writers mobilise their linguistic resources while writing. Adopting a process-oriented perspective, this study examines how multilingual postgraduate students in the UK exercise agency throughout their writing process. Visual records of writing practices in action and interview accounts from six purposively sampled participants provided insights into how their full repertoires shaped their writing practices. Findings show that the multilingual writing process is both a site of possibility and constraints for agency. Participants constructed translanguaging spaces by drawing on linguistic, semiotic, cultural, and digital resources. Agency was most evident in pre-writing and drafting, where diverse resources supported identity, voice, and resistance to marginalisation, while choosing to write only in English, or only in a non-English language, was a deliberate and agentive decision. By contrast, agency was constrained during post-writing, where academic conventions enforced English-monolingual output and limited multimodal expression. Linguistic backgrounds (e.g. perceived proficiency, prior language usage experiences) are the core of agentic decision-making. These findings contribute to the emerging understanding of multilingual writers as active agents and reinforce the call for pedagogical recognition of translanguaging and multimodal practices that encourage writer agency in multilingual academic writing.