How do young, multilingual students develop their text production and to what extent do they express themselves using multimodality? Is there a difference between multilingual students’ use of semiotic resources and other students? If that is the case, what kind of semiotic resources do the multilingual pupils prefer, and in what ways can the resources be said to create meaning? And if the multilingual students prefer these semiotic resources, how are their texts being valued within the school culture, and used for developing literacy? The study presented includes texts produced by third-year multilingual students attending ‘mainstream’ classrooms during the school year 2012/2013. It consists of qualitatively oriented  sociosemiotic, multimodal text analyses and teacher interviews. Theoretically, the study is based on linguistic and sociosemiotic research (Jewitt, 2009; G. Kress, 2003; GR Kress, 2010; GR Kress & Van Leeuwen, 2006; Løvland, 2006; Tønnessen, 2010) and second language research (Axelsson, 1998; Cummins 2001; Otterup, 2005). Fundamental is the fact that homogenisation characterizes the perception of multilingual students (Feinberg, 2000). Also, the idea that multilingual students literacy development benefits from meaningful negotiation, focusing on a variety of semiotic resources, is a basic argument in the study.