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A recent Australian Bureau of Standards report reports that suicide was the leading cause of death among young Australians in 2012.

“This fact, that young Australians are more likely to kill themselves than die in a car accident is an indictment on contemporary society and a wake-up call for adults responsible about the care and well being of children.”

Read the full article here

It is a dilemma that all parents face – wanting their children to grow up strong, confident and independent, but also wanting to keep them safe from harm. Many parents are reluctant to let their children take part in activities they themselves enjoyed and most children now spend less than three hours a week playing outdoors and getting dirty.

And this decline is affecting children’s ability to cope with life’s ups and downs

“Cotton-wool kids” are denied the chance to learn the independence, to understand the risk taking, and to make the mistakes that are associated with growing up. All of which build confidence and resilience by learning how to overcome failure and to deal with fear, uncertainty and all of life’s myriad challenges.

Over the years that LCF Fun Languages has been operating, we have occasionally been delighted to welcome children with autism, Asperger’s Syndrome or other learning disabilities into our language clubs.

By enrolling their child in a second language program, the parents of children with language impairments already understand that, if a child is able to learn a first language, there is no reason why they cannot learn a second. They simply desire to enhance and maximize their child’s communicative potential, often in the face of opposition from their speech pathologist or even their school.

We recently received this testimonial from one of our French parents and her experience with her own child with a speech delay:

“Our little girl was diagnosed with global developmental delay at 4 years of age. As a result, our speech therapist was concerned that she would not cope learning two languages (English/French). We knew that our daughter needed to be exposed to both languages from early childhood to better her chances to speak grammatically correctly as an adult. We met other bilingual families with children who had also learning or cognitive disabilities. Their experience, like ours dispels the myth that these children cannot learn a foreign language. Our children have a learning disability but are becoming nevertheless successful language learners.” Stephanie, mother of a 4 year old

In supporting parents with learning impairments, we also understand that the experiences of these children (and their parents) will, of course, vary considerably. However, the bottom line is that children will not experience any extra delay or difficulties than monolingual children with similar language difficulties.

Often, learning a new language will give children with a learning disability a self-confidence boost, especially if they lack other skills, often taken for granted among their peers, like riding a bicycle.

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.