Kelly and Ryan Cashatt, own and operate The Language Workshop for Children at the Kid's Academy in Parkville, MO. Kelly holds a Master of Arts in French from Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri. With Kelly's experience in foreign languages, she realizes the importance of providing an environment for children to learn languages early in life. Upon researching a language immersion program for their three young girls, they determined through hours of diligent research that Francois Thibaut's techniques are the proven expert on foreign language development for children. Being that no such program was readily available to teach a variety of languages to youngsters in the Northland, Kelly and Ryan sought to bring the excellence of Francois Thibaut's techniques to Parkville and offer to all children the opportunity to enjoy the learning of foreign languages.
The Language Workshop for Children was really founded in 1954, the year François Thibaut turned six and was sent off to boarding school outside Paris. Thibaut spoke French, but many other students were recent transplants from other parts of Europe, Britain, the Orient, Africa, the Middle East, the Americas, and Canada and had never spoken a word of French. So how did the instructors treat these new children in their French-only environment? They were ignored and gestured to sit down.
And so they sat, watching and listening, silently, for weeks. At first, this didn't make any sense to six-year old Thibaut. Couldn't the teachers see that the new kids didn't understand? A month went by, and the foreign children sat at their desks, fiddling with their pencils and gazing out the window. The teachers were cruel.
But in week six a miracle happened. As though the incubator had sprung its hatch the foreign children began uttering French, slowly, one word at a time, but then two words and three word sentences, and then voilà, they were speaking French in sentences, getting tenses and noun genders right, asking about games today and this and that tomorrow. And by month four they were jabbering in accent-free French with the teachers paying no more attention to their talkativeness than they had to their silence.
After attending the Sorbonne in Paris, Thibaut taught at a public high school in Paris, then came to New York in the early 1970's and gave French lessons at a language school for adults during the day and at a college at night. Month after month his students stumbled over simple pronunciation and easy grammar. As he struggled to help, Thibaut couldn't help remembering the foreign kids from his childhood. Learning a new language was easy for kids.
So in 1973 he began offering language classes for 10 to 12 year olds, radically young for the times. Within a few weeks his youngsters had mastered more than the adults. But the two groups learned completely differently. Visual aids had to be colorful, delivery quick, kids thrived on emotion, humor, everything needed to move, they paid attention to every word if it was introduced in a song, a rhyme, mime, or in a game. Children learned by playing (an didn't need it translated from English first).
As time went on Thibaut took younger siblings, then toddlers, and eventually infants. People phoned to say that he was crazy, that he was damaging and confusing kids, they needed to master English first. This was novel for the 70's,
By the 80's Thibaut had developed so many effective routines, songs, visual aids, and games that he finally named his body of work: the Thibaut Technique™, the country's pioneer in structured language education play. Since then his LWFC classes have prepared tens of thousands of children. The program now offers four languages, in five programs and six states. And his Professor Toto educational animation, released in 2004, delivers LWFC-quality language enrichment so dynamically that it won six major children's media awards.
