Cathy Wong, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and M.Ed./ESL program director at Monmouth University, has co-authored a peer-reviewed article in the journal Applied Linguistics (Oxford University Press, 2025) that offers an in-depth, autoethnographic account of raising multilingual children. The article draws from Wong’s lived experience as a mother-scholar navigating the emotional, practical, and ideological challenges of supporting her children’s Cantonese heritage language development. Through intimate conversations and reflective storytelling, the piece highlights the disconnect between professional knowledge and real-world parenting, shedding light on the societal gaps in support for multilingual families.
The article, “Translanguaging in Practice: A Motherscholar’s Journey to Nurture Cantonese Heritage Language Development,” was co-authored with Vashti Wai Yu Lee of Brigham Young University. It explores how parents and children actively respond to the pressures of dominant English-only ideologies while navigating personal, educational and social commitments to multilingualism.
“Writing this article was both emotionally challenging and deeply meaningful,” Wong said. “I wanted to document the dissonance between the theories I teach about translanguaging and the very real barriers I face as a parent raising heritage language speakers in a monolingual society.”
The article’s data sources include Wong’s written reflections, recorded interactions with her children, and exchanges with Lee, who served as a critical friend and interlocutor. Through inductive analysis, the authors identified themes such as “invisible labor,” linguistic guilt, ideological struggle, and translanguaging as a lived, embodied practice rather than a purely pedagogical theory.
In the article, Wong shares conversations with her own children as they reflect on their experiences learning Cantonese at home while speaking English in school and public life. She writes candidly about the systemic barriers that complicate heritage language development—even for families led by educators trained in translanguaging pedagogy.
Wong’s children—who contributed actively and selected pseudonyms to preserve their privacy—describe their discomfort and resistance when asked to speak Cantonese at home. Their insights, alongside Wong’s self-examination, demonstrate how deeply children internalize language hierarchies, and how fragile heritage language development can be even in linguistically informed households.
Wong argues that translanguaging, though powerful in theory, can feel vulnerable in practice when community resources are scarce and institutional support is lacking. She calls on educators and policymakers to create more expansive and flexible structures that honor the realities of multilingual families.
“Cathy’s case highlights the emotional and ideological labor that heritage language parents take on—often invisibly and unsupported,” Lee said. “It’s a reality many educators overlook when designing curricula or setting classroom norms.”
The article offers a model for other scholars interested in language policy, family discourse and identity formation. It also contributes to a growing body of applied linguistics literature that affirms lived experience, autoethnographic research and collaborative inquiry as essential to understanding how language functions in personal and social life.
Wong’s work contributes to growing calls for more responsive and inclusive language education, particularly for transnational and multilingual families. She also urges schools and communities to offer more robust support for families working to maintain heritage languages amid social and institutional constraints. She received Monmouth University’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2024.