We report findings from the analysis of essays written by 113 first-year university students that have implications for teaching beginning L2 writing in Korean contexts. The essays were written in three languages: Standard Arabic, French, and English at two major public universities. Three equivalent prompts in each language were developed in which students were asked to make and defend a choice between two alternatives, one per essay. The essays were scored by teachers literate in all three languages and each essay was coded by two graduate students for evidence of translingual practices across the three essays. Five categories of translingual practices were identified, serving different communicative and rhetorical purposes. A significant positive correlation was also found between the amount of translingual practice identified in the writers’ essays and their holistic scores, sentence complexity measured by t-units, and word count. After presenting our findings, we hope to extend our discussion to translingualism in Korea and invite discussion from the audience.