Pascale Setbon – Founder

Pascale Setbon was born in 1972 in the Quartier Latin of Paris. She attended La Sorbonne where she earned a BA in Management and an MA in Marketing. Pascale relocated with her family to New York in 1997, where she experienced great difficulty in finding bilingual educational programs for her two young children. She soon found that there were many ther families in the same situation who were looking for a program to support their desire to maintain and strengthen a multicultural identity and heritage. Pascale decided to explore this dilemma by attending several language workshops and conferences given by Bank Street College, the Board of Education, and other accredited institutes. After four years of dedicated research and studies, Pascale was ready to share with others what she had learned. She helped to develop the French Playgroups curriculum at the International School of Brooklyn and for two years worked at the French Institute in Manhattan. In 2005 Pascale launched her own language-diverse learning program, L’isle Aux Enfants at the fledgling Language and Laughter Studio (LLS). Four years later, LLS has become a full-fledged learning center for early bilingual education with more than 25 different classes in French and Spanish. Pascale believes that children learn and make sense of their world through first-hand experiences with people and materials. With this approach in mind, Pascale encourages children to immerse themselves in the a second language through everyday activities. Complementing tacit experiential language acquisition with focused directives, classes at LLS help to facilitate bilingualism where children learn to hear, understand, and speak foreign languages with confidence and pride.