Yining Wang

This study explores how Chinese‐Australian families defy systemic pressures toward English monolingualism to achieve exceptional heritage language maintenance (HLM). Through a tripartite Family Language Policy (FLP) framework—ideologies, management and practices—the research examines three ‘positive deviant’ children who sustain high‐level Chinese proficiency in Australia. The research, conducted between 2017 and 2020, employs a qualitative approach through interviews, conversations, observations and documentation of literacy resources to explore the children's linguistic adjustment, bilingual practices, HL learning, socialization and proficiency. Findings highlight the interplay of deliberate FLP, child agency and transnational resource mobilization in achieving exceptional HLM. By centring rare successes, this research shifts discourse from HL attrition to resilience, offering actionable insights for families and policymakers navigating bilingualism in host sociolinguistic climates. However, findings also reveal systemic barriers and class disparities that perpetuate linguistic marginalization, fostering elite bilingualism accessible primarily to privileged families. It calls for educational reforms valuing multilingualism and redistributive policies to support diverse diasporic communities.

Purpose: A new Parent Support Worker (PSW) service was piloted in three Australian hospitals. This study assesses the feasibility and acceptability (including preliminary effectiveness) of the service in supporting cancer patients with children. Methods: A multi-site, mixed-methods study collected quantitative and qualitative data on the effectiveness of the service (pre post-test, n = 36), qualitative and quantitative data on acceptability of the service (survey, n = 43), and qualitative data on acceptability (semi-structured interviews, n = 13). Feasibility was assessed through rates of service uptake amongst referred parents. Results: Of 1133 parents referred, 810 (71%) accepted to receive the service, suggesting high interest in PSW support. Interviewees likewise reported that the service was accessible and facilitated further referrals, indicating good feasibility. Surveys completed three months after accessing PSW support showed high acceptability and satisfaction. Additionally, there was preliminary evidence of service impacts: parents’ distress, parenting concerns, parenting efficacy, and stress about situations of concern improved significantly from pre- to post-service (all p < 0.005). Interviewees further described how their emotional coping and confidence to support and communicate with their children had improved through contact with the service. Conclusion: The PSW service, integrated into a novel cross-sector model of care, showed to be feasible and acceptable to parent patients and their partners and improved psychological and parenting outcomes. The study suggests refinements to the service and the need for future larger studies to explore the effectiveness of the service in improving parents’ outcomes. This study complements previous evidence on the implementation of the PSW service in hospitals.

This study explores the emotional dimensions of language within three Chinese–Australian families raisingMandarin English bilingual children. Employing ethnographic methods including interviews, observations, and the collection of literacy evidence, it delves into the families’ migration stories, language ideologies, and emotional experiences. Additionally, the study examines the factors influencing family language policies (FLPs) and the emotional climate surrounding language within these households. The research reveals that these families grappled with the dual challenges of maintaining their children’s heritage Chinese while ensuring their competitiveness in mainstream English. These societal and familial pressures conditioned parents’ emotions and the decisions they make regarding FLPs. The study uncovers the intricate interplay between parents’ emotional states, their children’s bilingual dynamics, changes in FLPs within the hierarchically constructed linguistic landscape. It underscores the significance of power relations in shaping FLPs and highlights the pivotal role of children’s heritage language bilingualism in contributing to the overall well being of the immigrant families.

Emotionality is increasingly given prominence in the field of language acquisition and socialization in migration contexts. This cross-sectional study explores the emotional experiences of Chinese and African immigrant families in their practices of maintaining their children's heritage languages. We used open-ended interviews, field notes from informal conversations and observations, photographic evidence of children's literacy practices, and language portrait (LP) descriptions, to collect data. Results from an ethnographic analysis of the data revealed a whole range of negative and positive parental emotions (e.g., anxiety, loss, shame vs. enjoyment, accomplishment, and pride), in the discourse of maintaining heritage and minority languages. We discuss the language emotions, whether positive or negative, in light of language ideologies, which specifically points to the significance of profit discourse in the formation of family language policies (FLPs). This materialistic valorization reveals the complexities of power relations between English and minority languages, between Chinese and African languages, and within various Chinese and African languages. Consequently, the distinct hierarchies between English and minority languages and the hidden layers within minority languages further legitimate diasporic ideologies of Chinese and African parents in terms of the emotionality associated with prioritizing, maintaining, and forgoing languages. These findings suggests that language emotionality is of vital importance to the psycho-social wellbeing of immigrant families and has practical implications for policymakers and heritage language research.

Ideological divisions in the United States have become increasingly prominent in daily communication. Accordingly, there has been much research on political polarization, including many recent efforts that take a computational perspective. By detecting political biases in a corpus of text, one can attempt to describe and discern the polarity of that text. Intuitively, the named entities (i.e., the nouns and the phrases that act as nouns) and hashtags in text often carry information about political views. For example, people who use the term "pro-choice" are likely to be liberal, whereas people who use the term "pro-life" are likely to be conservative. In this paper, we seek to reveal political polarities in social-media text data and to quantify these polarities by explicitly assigning a polarity score to entities and hashtags. Although this idea is straightforward, it is difficult to perform such inference in a trustworthy quantitative way. Key challenges include the small number of known labels, the continuous spectrum of political views, and the preservation of both a polarity score and a polarity-neutral semantic meaning in an embedding vector of words. To attempt to overcome these challenges, we propose the Polarity-aware Embedding Multi-task learning (PEM) model. This model consists of (1) a self-supervised context-preservation task, (2) an attention-based tweet-level polarity-inference task, and (3) an adversarial learning task that promotes independence between an embedding's polarity dimension and its semantic dimensions. Our experimental results demonstrate that our PEM model can successfully learn polarity-aware embeddings that perform well classification tasks. We examine a variety of applications and we thereby demonstrate the effectiveness of our PEM model. We also discuss important limitations of our work and encourage caution when applying the it to real-world scenarios.