Language is How Humans Think Together; Getting Young People Engaged in Learning How Languages Work

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/language-how-humans-think-together-getting-young-work-knox-ph-d

Language is how humans think together. A recent article from Babbel, published in the Business Insider, notes that "knowing more than one language could give you an edge in your career" and highlights six top business leaders who are bilingual. "Researchers have uncovered that people who speak more than one language are better at something called inhibitory control, which involves being able to filter out irrelevant stimuli and to develop more measured responses to events.
In addition to an increased attention span, learning a new language can benefit your work in other ways, including being able to connect with a greater number of people, and gaining a new perspective on the world." Learning language begins with learning about how languages work, and getting motivated to put that learning into purposeful action. 
For many people, who started wanting to learn a language but then quit, learning a language became nothing more than a tedious memorization process. The book, LANGUAGE SOUP: A TASTE OF HOW DIVERSE PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD COMMUNICATE, was written and just recently expanded and revised with the purpose of engaging young people and families in seeing that languages are intriguing and diverse communication systems, and that and language information (like unique writing systems, odd spelling rules, unusual vocabulary, and decoding sentence structure) can be fun to learn about. When you find something fun, you get engaged and want to learn and do more with that new learning.  
This world of ours increasingly needs people who have inhibitory control, and who want to communicate with and understand, nuances of conversation with other friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, around the world. Within the easy-to-read chapters of this book, young people and their families will find all sorts of intriguing nuggets and will find that at least one of the chapters (English, Latin, Greek, Spanish, French, Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Yoruba, Finnish, Navajo, Arapaho, constructed languages, and lots of other general language information) will snag their attention. When you have attention, you have a starting point for building that bridge of shared thinking and conversation.
Ref: http://www.businessinsider.com/6-top-business-leaders-that-speak-more-than-one-language-2017-8/#mark-zuckerberg-co-founder-and-ceo-of-facebook-1