Come here if your DCs study foreign languages at A Level!

[RatDesPaquerettes]

Right, I posted this in chat but it went nowhere.

Have your DCs got penpals/Skype friends residing in the country whose language they study?

If yes, how did they go about finding such friends?

The daughter of a French friend has asked me to try and find her an English-speaking 'penfriend' and I am struggling to find a suitable candidate in my circle of friends. She is 15.5 years old and my friends' kids are either too young or have already stopped studying French.

Has anybody got any experience of this website to find a penpal?

I do not have kids at school in England and I have no easy access to a French teacher to ask them whether they might recommend any of their students as potential penpals.

Thanks for your help.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnd bump!

My dd2 who is 15 is in love with both of Jedward; she has a huge number of twitter fans from many countries who tweet in English. DD1 has French and German friends from school exchanges.

Surely tweeting about Jedward is a cheery idea!

I think she is now too old for school exchanges and never got the chance to go on one in her previous years.

It seems that exchanges with English schools are getting rarer as there is not much demand from the English side.

Tweeting about Jedward....

Hi, I have come across this website during my teacher training (not looked into it yet, too many lessons to plan/essays to write). I don't really like the look of the one you mentioned. Lots of dating ads plus the "yes, we do have incarcerated members". I would class that as an adult only site. I wouldn't want my DCs or pupils using it on my recommendation. Hope you manage to find her someone.

Thanks, Change. I must confess that I was not completely comfortable with the website I included in my OP.

I will look into the website you mentioned.

Our kids do exchanges at 16/17 with a French/German school - we're in Ireland though. (No exchange chez nous this year, God be praised, after a 4 year run of them!) That looks a good site.

Actually, I've had a quick look and that Euro site seems to be more oriented to teachers than pupils. I'm not in school for another couple of weeks and am not a French specialist either so wouldn't particularly know any suitable pupils. Hopefully you will find someone via here

Thanks, Stleger. It looks like exchanges are mostly organised by schools, and it is not straightforward to arrange anything outside of this arena.

When you said, it looked like a good site, did you mean the penpalparty one or the etwinning one recommended by Change?

Thanks, Change. I was struggling a bit to see how the etwinning site might work for an individual rather than a school.

Thanks for the link anyway. I might pass it on to my friend's daughter in case her school is involved in any of the projects.

Change's site! We had a local town twinning exchange here, but it has vanished due to lack of interest.

Yep... there is a trend here, I think.

Shame that there is no more exchange chez vous!!

Have you checked the classmates? I just accidentally got known that of one DD's best friends at school for two years is a native Spanish speaker (DD studies Spanish).

I don't know whether she has. I could ask her to check if any of her friends has any 'penpal' who would have a friend who could be her 'penpal'. A kind of double-date...