Developing research skills and academic literacy is essential for student success, yet their progression often varies across multilingual higher education systems. This study investigates these competencies among 692 bachelor’s and master’s students in Kazakhstan’s trilingual higher education context, where Kazakh, Russian, and English serve as languages of instruction. The contributions of multilingual academic practices, language of instruction, reading proficiency in three languages, peer collaboration, teacher facilitation, learner autonomy, and academic performance were examined using hierarchical regression and cumulative logit models. Results show that multilingual academic practices emerged as the strongest and most consistent predictor of both research skills (β = 0.56) and academic literacy (β = 0.69), explaining 38% and 49% of variance respectively and clearly outperforming medium of instruction, single-language reading proficiency, and programme level. Peer collaboration, teacher facilitation, and academic performance emerged as the most powerful predictors of students’ overall self-assessed research competence. The findings position multilingualism as both linguistic and cognitive resource, offering implications for curriculum design, staff training, and multilingual research-based learning in higher education. The study advances international scholarship on multilingual higher education.