7. Very young or older pupils?
The age criterion is very important, but there is no clear limit.
Centres of interest and perceptions of culture and the world around us change almost from year to year during adolescence. So it is preferable to choose partners of the same age (one year’s difference at most).
There were no very young classes in the project. The youngest pupils were 12 years old. Although these pupils took part in the work, we found that the subjects proposed did not enable them to address interculturality: they were content to discover the pleasure of exchanges in a foreign language with other youngsters. By contrast, the same subjects led to real exchanges between the adolescents.