Federal Minister for Education and Training, Simon Birmingham, joined the flow of ministers trickling through Eden-Monaro and visited a Queanbeyan preschool on Tuesday May 24.
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The minister was at Harris Park Preschool to discuss the government's Early Learning Languages Australia program that was recently launched at the preschool.
The Early Learning Languages Australia or ELLA program consists of 35 apps that teach preschoolers one of five languages.
Across Australia, 41 preschools participated in a trial program in 2015 and after positive feedback from students, parents and teachers, more early learning centres are introducing the program in 2016.
The program offers iPad apps that teach Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian, French and Japanese.
Managing director of Queanbeyan and District Preschool Association, Mandy Jackson said Harris Park had chosen Indonesian for their students.
"We had a lot of response from parents, we were expecting maybe a quarter of families might be interested, but it was well over half.
"We've got 215 children, so that's a lot of children taking part.
"Early days, but you can see the children are really engaging," she said.
Federal member for Eden-Monaro Peter Hendy was with the Education Minister and said Queanbeyan's involvement with exports was a good reason to learn a language.
"In Queanbeyan there is a lot of high tech and defence related manufacturing that has principal markets overseas as opposed to in Australia.
"Some of these preschoolers will end up being fluent in those languages and that's really improving the job opportunities for those children here in Queanbeyan," Mr Hendy said.
Simon Birmingham said Indonesian was a wise choice.
"It is the most populous nation in our region and a massive trading partner for us.
"We've seen a very significant decline in the last couple of decades in the number of Australian students studying foreign languages and we want to really rebuild that," said Mr Birmingham.
"An important starting point is with our youngest children, our preschoolers, to give them an introduction to language that we hope will inspire them to maintain language throughout their studies and the schooling system to support them."
