Plans to overhaul the way languages are taught in NSW schools will see all primary school students being exposed to at least one language before they start high school, according to a recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald.

Despite more than 30 languages on offer in the state’s schools, less than 10 percent of students enrolled in the HSC studied one last year. Under the proposed plan, primary school teachers who are bilingual will be retrained as language teachers and schools will be encouranged to collaborate with community language providers to not only increase this number but to also meet the needs of the more than a quarter million students who speak a second language at home.

And the fact that the federal government wants 40% of year 12 students to be studying a language within the next 10 years, means that New South Wales is not alone in wanting to dramatically boost the interest in languages.

For most young children, going to school is something to look forward to: learning, a little bit of fun and, of course, new friends. But for some children it can be an altogether different experience, especially for those who may find it difficult to form new friendships.

For these children, school can feel like much more of a chore than it should and with their ever increasing workloads, teachers are often at a loss as to how to help children in this situation.

One of the key benefits of our LCF Fun Languages after school clubs is the opportunity for children to create and nurture lasting social bonds in an engaging and stress free environment.

And because most friendships are forged in the fires of a common interest, the children who attend our Fun Languages clubs find they can easily connect with each other through their desire to learn more about other countries, cultures and languages.

Our ability to form a limitless number of thoughts into a spoken word is what distinguishes the human species from our less evolved cousins but, while we know that language first appeared among Homo sapiens around 30 000 to 100 000 years ago, we still don’t know all the secrets of exactly HOW language evolved, or how the thousands of languages we have today have developed.

When you hear somebody speaking Polish and another person speaking Persian, they sound like totally different languages, don’t they? But listen more closely and you’ll hear similarities, like how one of the Persian words for mother is mada, and in Polish, it’s matka.

That’s because both languages belong to a large family known as the Indo-European languages. A group that contains over 400 languages and dialects: Polish, Persian, English, French, German, Russian, Icelandic. The list goes on.

But if you trace all those languages to their roots, exactly where and when did they come from? It’s a 200-year-old question and a topic of controversy.

According to linguists (those who undertake the scientific study of human language) there is an important distinction between language acquisition and language learning.

So what is the difference?

The distinction is made based on an individual’s internal cognitive process and the degree of conscious thought brought to the learning task.

Children acquire language through a subconscious process during which they are unaware of grammatical rules. This is similar to the way they acquire their first language. The emphasis is on the text of the communication and not on the form.

In a second-language acquisition situation, the language is spoken in the immediate environment of the learner, who has good opportunities to use the language by participating in natural communication situations.

Language learning, on the other hand, is not communicative. It is the result of direct instruction in the rules of language and is not an age-appropriate activity for young learners. In foreign language learning, the language is not spoken in the learner’s immediate environments and the student has little or no opportunity to use the language in natural communication.

Although the past 40 years have seen numerous studies documenting the superior language skills of girls, excelling in both their native tongue and foreign language learning, the biological mechanism behind this ability has puzzled scientists.

However, more recent research may have provided the answer and suggests that girls’ linguistic adeptness is the result of greater activity in girls of the brain areas used specifically for language encoding. These are the so called language areas which are involved in word meanings, the sounds of words, the spelling of words and their visual identification.

Boys on the other hand showed a lot of brain activity in those areas that are tied to more visual and auditory functions and are more sensory – their brain activity appeared to be confined to the left side of the brain.

This reliance on different brain areas for accurate language performance suggests that boys and girls are processing language information differently and the superior language ability of girls lies in the way they process words.