Abstract
There is limited research exploring the acquisition of composition as a sociocultural practice in multilingual discourse. This study offers a different perspective of composition acquisition, focusing on composition as a sociocultural activity that is facilitated by multilingual discourse. It aimed at exploring how multilingual practices in sociocultural dialoguing may affect learners' acquisition of writing abilities. It draws on audio recorded and written excerpts data collected in 3rd grade (16-year-olds) composition class, and works with sociocultural discourse analysis to analyze peer-peer dialoguing and therefore explore how multilingual practices scaffold learners as they participate in composing. The results showed that multilingual practices based on sociocultural dialoguing played an important role in students' composition development. When students dialogue in response to composition issues, they bring in their sociocultural knowledge, identities, and experiences that may affect and enrich their composition. Theoretical and pedagogical implications for multilingualism and composition research are discussed.