François Thibaut

François Thibaut (born January 3, 1948) is an educator known for developing the Thibaut Technique second language acquisition method for children and is the Founder/Director of The Language Workshop for Children (“LWFC”) nationwide educational centers based in New York City. Thibaut’s technique is the basis of the curriculum offered at LWFC programs and in the Professor Toto children’s language education animation. The LWFC begins teaching languages to children at the age of six months, when they’re preverbal.

At the age of six Thibaut was enrolled at the College Saint Barbe boarding school in Paris where teachers made no effort to translate or explain the meaning of the French language curriculum in which newly enrolled, non-French speaking students would be immersed. Instead after six weeks absorbing French in a context-rich language immersion classroom, the non-French elementary age children would begin speaking single French words. By week eight they would use two and then three word sentences, and by 2½ months they could construct complete, accent-free French sentences, correctly attribute noun genders, and use past, present, and future tenses. Thibaut observed an example of what neurolinguist Eric Lenneberg later identified as a critical period language development in his Biological Foundations of Language (1967). Young Thibaut’s observations led him to make language immersion, emotionally stimulating and context-rich activities, and no-translation central to the LWFC’s classes and his Thibaut Technique method.

Thibaut emigrated to New York City in 1973, when foreign language instruction was focused on high school and college students. As a teacher he was frustrated by watching his college-age students struggle to acquire the same French grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary lessons week after week through traditional translation and grammar drill methods. So he switched his teaching focus to children, abandoned translation-drill methods, and adopted the context-rich, language acquisition devices that he had observed at his elementary school, adding play, color, and humor.