The Language Workshop for Children was really founded in 1954, the year François Thibaut turned six and was packed off to boarding school outside Paris. Thibaut’s first language was French but half of the students were recent transplants from other parts of Europe, Britain, the Orient, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas and could not understand a word of French. So what did the teachers do make new students understand their lessons? They ignored them.
They simply invited the foreign students into their classroom, and let them sit, week after week, watching and listening, watching and listening. It didn't make sense to young Thibaut. A month went by, and the new kids continued to sit silently, fiddling with their pencils and gazing out the window. To young François, the teachers were cruel.
But in week six a miracle happened. The incubator sprang its hatch. The new children were suddenly uttering French, slowly at first, one word at a time, but then making two word sentences, and three. Then by week eight, voilà, they were speak French in full sentences, getting tenses and noun genders right, chatting about today and asking about tomorrow. And by month four they were speaking perfect, accent-free French, with the teachers paying no more attention to their talkativeness than they had to their silence. Strangely, though, when their parents came to visit, their children had to translate for them. But grown-ups are supposed to be smarter, Thibaut thought.
In the early 1970’s, after attending the Sorbonne in Paris, François Thibaut taught in a Paris high school, then came to New York, teaching French at an adult language school during the day and at a college at night. As his grown-ups stumbled over simple pronunciation and easy grammar Thibaut thought about the foreign kids from his childhood. Learning French had been so easy for them. Could children be more capable of learning language than adults?
So he began working with 4 to 12 year olds, radical for 1973, and within just a few weeks his young students were further along than his adults. Not only were they instantly mastering pronunciation, the children remembered larger inventories of language more quickly than the adults. But to capture their attention Thibaut had to make visual aids colorful, delivery quick, and lessons charged with emotion, humor, and movement. Kids paid rapt attention if words came through songs, rhymes, or noisy games. Best of all, children grasped meaning through context, mime, and immersion, not translation. Then as Thibaut began taking even younger children, toddlers, and eventually infants, people began phoning to say “you’re crazy ... you’re damaging these kids ... you’re confusing them Thibaut,” and invariably “they’ve GOT TO learn English FIRST.” But he saw results so by the 1980 he had developed enough routines, songs, visual aids, and games to name his method the Thibaut Technique™.
But he knew that he was getting results. So by the 1980 he had developed enough routines, songs, visual aids, and games he named his method the Thibaut Technique™. Finally in the mid-90’s, the media began focusing on the topic in earnest as academic studies were released from respected university neurolinguists, child psycholgists, and education specialists corroborating observations and methods used by Thibaut, and his boarding school teachers, for many years.
Today The Language Workshop for Children has prepared tens of thousands of children for a global world, and now offers four languages in five programs and seven states. And Thibaut’s Professor Toto at-home educational animation delivers language enrichment so dynamically that it won six major children's media awards.
