Big Impact or No Advantage? Raciolinguistic Framings in Australian Media Coverage of Young People's Multilingualism

ABSTRACT This article examines Australian media coverage of childhood multilingualism and language education through 85 news articles published between 2013 and 2024 across major news outlets. Using a critical post‐structural framework and raciolinguistic perspective, we demonstrate how identical linguistic practices (multilingualism and language learning) are framed through different ideological lenses depending on children's racial positioning. While White, monolingual children's language learning is consistently celebrated through neoliberal ideologies of competitive advantage and cognitive benefit, racialised children's existing multilingualism is constructed as a deficit, barrier or threat requiring intervention. These differential framings reveal systematic raciolinguistic hierarchies that privilege Whiteness while marginalising Indigenous and migrant communities’ linguistic practices. Our findings reveal how media discourses actively construct and maintain linguistic inequalities through racialised framings, demonstrating the importance of examining how language and race intersect in public discourse, with significant implications for how sociolinguistics advocates for children and young people's multilingualism in the Australian and other settler‐colonial contexts. 本文通过分析2013年至2024年间主要新闻媒体发表的85篇新闻报道, 探究澳大利亚媒体如何报道儿童期多语现象和语言教育。本文从批判性后结构主义框架和种族语言学视角出发, 展示了相同的语言实践(多语言化及语言习得), 如何因儿童的种族身份, 通过不同意识形态视角被建构呈现。在新自由主义意识形态下, 白人单语儿童的语言学习常被誉为竞争优势和认知收益, 而在社会语境中被归类为特定种族的儿童的多语能力则被建构为需要干预的缺陷、障碍或威胁。这些差异化的呈现方式揭示了系统性的种族语言等级制度：一方面赋予白人身份以特权，另一方面边缘化原住民及移民社群的语言实践。研究揭示了媒体话语如何通过种族化的框架, 积极构建并维持着语言不平等, 凸显审视语言与种族在公共话语中交互的重要性。这一研究对在澳大利亚及其他殖民移民语境下儿童与青少年的多语现象具有深远意义。