Abstract:  This article examines the methodological challenges and opportunities of researching translingual writing practices among emergent multilingual children in South Korea. Drawing on a four‐month qualitative case study involving three focal participants, the study explores their translingual writing across school, home, community, and a specially designed after‐school writing program. A multi‐sited, multilingual research design combined classroom observations, interviews, writing artifacts, and digital traces produced in English, Korean, and/or Russian. The multilingual nature of the dataset required sustained attention to translation, interpretation, and shifting ideological meanings across research contexts. Ethical tensions and power asymmetries emerged in decisions surrounding transcription, translation, and voice representation. While participants actively mobilized diverse linguistic resources during composing, this diversity was only partially visible in the final products due to institutional language norms. The findings underscore the need for flexible, reflexive, and context‐sensitive methodologies for multilingual research in migration societies.

Keywords:  Koryoin students; multilingual education; multilingual learners; multilingual qualitative research; translingualism

Published:   8 January 2026

Issue:   Vol 14 (2026): Multilingual Challenges: Empirical Social Research in Migration Societies, Transnational Spaces, and International Contexts (In Progress)