International research pleads for the development of heritage language competencies as they may represent an additional resource, and a basis for the acquisition of the majority language as well as foreign languages (Bialystok, 2002; Bialystok and Poarch, 2014; Cummins, 2000, 2013; Leseman et al., 2009; Verhoeven, 1994). A crucial condition for children to successfully utilize these resources is the ability to read and write in a heritage language. To capture students’ multiliterate skills, Cenoz and Gorter 2011 proposed a “Focus on Multilingualism” approach to conducting a research on the whole linguistic repertoire of multilingual speakers. However, the research covering the diversity and complexity of literacy provided by a multilingual context poses a methodological challenge and is, thus, as jet rarely represented by quantitative studies. The current paper aims to address this methodological challenge and to comparatively investigate students’ multilingual writing ability in three languages: in a majority language – German, in the heritage languages Turkish or Russian, and in English as a foreign language learned in school. Conducting the analysis on students’ writing in all languages from their linguistic repertoire should trace the development of students’ multiliterate skills and unveil the contextual factors which might be fostering or hampering the development of these skills. This paper draws on the first results from the German study, which investigates the development of students’ literacy skills, measured both as students’ writing and reading competence in their heritage languages, in German, and in foreign languages (English, French, and Russian) from a longitudinal perspective. This study is being conducted in Hamburg, Germany and involves two cohorts with approximately 1800 students from the 7th and the 9th grade. This study intends to track students’ language performance witin three years, tested at four measurement points. The testing is conducted with two largest migrant groups, the heritage speakers of Russian and Turkish, as well as monolingual German students. For the current analyses to be presented, we selected the data on students’ writing in heritage and majority language, and in English as well as the background data. The proposed paper discusses a methodological approach for capturing and measuring writing skills in different heritage languages over time. Moreover, the analysed data from the first measurement point should provide first insights into the role of students’ literacy skills in the heritage language to the writing in majority language and in English as foreign language.

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