Twinning without tears

Sarah was embarrassed by her lack of language skills

Teachers are being encouraged to adopt a new tactic to reverse the decline in pupils taking up foreign languages at school.

The government wants every school to be twinned with one abroad, so that pupils understand why it's important to learn another language.

But critics say the decline in language teaching in schools is the government's own fault, because it's allowing pupils to drop languages at 14.

What you told Breakfast I don't think that our kids are particularly bad at learning languages, it's just that we are so bad at teaching them. Red tape and total boredom rule our classrooms. Mark Husman, teacher Read more viewers' comments on our Your Say page

James Westhead went with a group of British pupils on a school exchange trip to Holland. You can watch his report by clicking on the link on the right hand side of this page.

We talked to the Secretary of State for Education Charles Clarke.

He defended the decision to let children drop foreign languages at fourteen:

"We have decied to focus on teaching languages at primary school - that's where children learn languages best, " he told us.

The Department for Education hopes to encourage links between schools across the world, through the global gateway website. It hopes that even if schools can't organise exchange trips, they can swap e-mails and do webcasts instead.

We asked you to tell us what's wrong with language teaching in British schools. And you deluged us with e-mails.

read some of your e-mails and texts on our Your Comments page