Rate My Professor Yining Wang

Yining Wang is an Honorary Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University, within the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences. She completed her PhD in Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in August 2020, with a thesis titled 'The heritage language maintenance of Chinese migrant children and their families' that examines attitudes and practices in Australian migrant households. Prior to her doctorate, Wang earned a Bachelor of Arts from Hunan University of Science and Technology and a Master of Translation from Jinan University in Guangzhou, China. She worked as a lecturer for eleven years at the Zhuhai Campus of Beijing Normal University in China before pursuing her PhD studies in Australia. Subsequently, she served as a research assistant on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project 'Everyday Intercultural Communication in Australia,' led by Distinguished Professor Ingrid Piller. Wang is a member of the Language on the Move research team and contributes to its research blogs. She was nominated for the China Studies Association of Australia Thesis Prize for China Studies in 2020.

Wang's academic interests encompass bilingual education, multilingualism, heritage language maintenance, the education of Chinese migrants' children, and Chinese immigrant religion in Australia. Her research explores emotional challenges, linguistic anxiety, power relations, identity construction, and religious influences in heritage language practices among Chinese immigrant families. Notable publications include 'Challenges and contradictions at play in heritage bilingualism practices: experiences of newly arrived immigrant parents from Peoples Republic of China' (2025, Springer); 'From erosion to fluency: reversing language shift in Chinese Australian households' (2025, Frontiers in Psychology); 'Heritage language performance and identity manifestation of 1.5 generation Chinese Australians: age of migration perspective' (2025, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development); 'Bible is the source of hope: Christianity as a weapon of parenting for Chinese immigrant families in Australia' (2024, Rowan and Littlefield); 'Home-related strategies and practices to maintain Chinese heritage language and their implications for identity construction' (2024, Brill); 'Linguistic anxiety, insecurity, and fulfilment of bilingual parenting: emotional complexities experienced by Chinese immigrant families' (2023); 'Speaking Chinese or no breakfast: emotional challenges and experiences confronting Chinese immigrant families in heritage language maintenance' (2023, International Journal of Bilingualism); 'Parental emotionality and power relations in heritage language maintenance: experiences of Chinese and African immigrant families' (2023, Frontiers in Psychology); and 'Changing discourses of Chinese language maintenance in Australia: unpacking language ideologies of first-generation Chinese migrants' (2023, Frontiers in Psychology).