Rate My Professor Hanna Torsh

Dr. Hanna Torsh is a Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University, part of the Faculty of Medicine, Health and Human Sciences. She obtained her PhD in Linguistics from the same institution, with her doctoral thesis on language learning trajectories, gender, and migration status among linguistically intermarried couples earning the 2019 Michael Clyne Prize from the Australian Linguistic Society. As a member of the Language on the Move research team, Torsh's research specializations encompass language in migration, multilingual families and family language policy and practice, language learning and teaching, intercultural communication, applied linguistics, second language learning and teaching, and linguistic diversity in institutional communication. She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate applied linguistics courses, including as unit convenor for Phonology and Teaching Pronunciation.

Torsh's first book, Linguistic Intermarriage in Australia: Between Pride and Shame (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), is based on her PhD research and investigates how English-speaking background partners of non-English-speaking background migrants negotiate language differences in relationships, partnerships, and parenting. Key recent publications include 'The digital shift in parental strategies for heritage language maintenance' in the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development (2025), 'Big impact or no advantage? Raciolinguistic framings in Australian media coverage of young people's multilingualism' in the Journal of Sociolinguistics (2026), and 'Feminist approaches in applied linguistics research' in the Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (2025). In 2024, she received the Chitra Fernando Fellowship for her project on perceptions of education and post-school futures for children from Language Other Than English communities. Torsh engages publicly through presentations on heritage language maintenance, pronunciation teaching, and gender roles in bilingual childrearing, as well as hosting episodes of the Language on the Move podcast on topics like sexual predation in English language teaching and governing multilingual societies. Her 28 research outputs from 2012 to 2026 underscore her contributions to applied sociolinguistics.