Adolesco was founded in France by Jacques and late Katherine Pinault and Florence and Xavier Racinais. Jacques started arranging language exchanges in 1978, initiating and nurturing year-long exchanges (six months for each child) for three decades – Xavier, at nine, was the first child to exchange over 37 years ago!
Some years ago, Jacques, Katherine, Florence, and Xavier saw the need for shorter term exchanges between the UK & Ireland and Europe and Adolesco, offering exchanges of between 3 week and 3 months, was born.
Adolesco is a French Company, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the idea that linguistic and cultural exchanges offer participating children and families extraordinary benefits.
We have a network of multi-lingual representatives in Spain, Germany, the UK, Ireland, Canada and the USA to ensure that right from your first call to hosting and travelling you and your child or teenager are fully supported at every stage.
It’s not just a linguistic exchange: we propose something rather different:
It is our aim to create friendships between different countries and cultures, a friendship between two children and their families. To us this is the most important part, since after the friendship has begun, the linguistic benefits will come quite naturally.
Throughout his or her stay abroad, your child will hear the foreign language 24/7. But also, thanks to the friendship that will have grown during both parts of the exchange, they will be motivated to pay close attention during the language lessons back at school. Of course return visits to their new family in subsequent years will help as well.
Right from the beginning, after the first long-term exchange, we saw that the linguistic results were remarkable but that the human side of the adventure was even more astonishing!
Learning a new language, understanding another culture, and growing beyond our cultural boundaries benefits ourselves, our families and our world.