Our goal with this special issue was to bring together a range of research on learning to read in more than one language. In this introduction, we provide an overview of clear diversity across the language pairings, learning contexts and reading-related skills examined. We also highlight some particularly noteworthy and often intriguing findings that emerged across the articles. These include the examination of transfer at the skill level, as well as of the direction of the uncovered relationships in time and between languages. They also include the examination of cases in which we do and do not see transfer, as well as the clear contributions of bilingual research to theoretical debates across both monolingual and bilingual research. We think that these point to some exciting new questions for future research.