The conundrum weighs heavily on middle-class French parents who want to send their offspring to learn English with a British family: how will les enfants chéris cope with the rain-drenched, beer-swilling, pizza-munching culture that they are convinced lies on the other side of the Channel? Will they be starved, neglected, or sent out to catch their death of cold?

Now hope is at hand. A growing number of British expatriates in France are offering immersion in the language and culture of the UK without the drawbacks of being there.

“This is something which is really increasing,” said Laetitia Maury-Laribière, the programme director at Séjours Internationaux Linguistiques et Culturels, a firm that organises home stays for French children.

“They share the daily life with the family but they stay in France. The parents feel more secure. If the kids are homesick, they can come home or watch French television.”

Fiona Sanecka, a Scot who has lived in the Dordogne for four years, is among dozens of Britons who are opening their homes to French adolescents — and occasionally adults — wanting to learn English.

“I give them lessons in the morning and in the afternoon I take them swimming, to play tennis or to go sightseeing,” said Mrs Sanecka, 59, who has a diploma to teach English as a foreign language.

“I did it when I lived in the UK and when we moved to France I carried on doing it here. The parents feel safer if their children are within driving distance. They bring them here themselves and so they meet me, which reassures them.”

Mrs Sanecka, who has taken in 14 linguistic lodgers so far this summer, feeds them typical British dishes such as shepherd's pie and roast beef. But the ingredients are French — to the relief of Gallic teenagers brought up in the belief that British meals are an indigestible torture.

“I don't want to say bad things about Britain but you do hear horror stories about children sent to stay with families there,” said Mrs Sanecka.

Tens of thousands of French pupils cross the Channel for paid home stays every year, but their parents often complain that they are left to their own devices, fed a diet of frozen food and ignored by the rest of the household.

Monique Touitou, whose 17-year-old daughter stayed with a British family in western France this summer, said: “It's a lot less worrying than to think of my daughter alone in the streets of an English town.”

There are other advantages to what Séjours Internationaux Linguistiques et Culturels describes as “l'Anglais made in France”.

In a report on the trend last week, for example, the TF1 television station said that French teenagers were able to learn English with British families in the South of France “more than 1,000km away from the bad English weather”.

It showed film of a 13-year-old girl riding a horse under a cloudless sky as her hosts taught her la langue de Shakespeare.

The cost of a week's immersion with a British family in France ranges from about 500 euros (£400) to more than 3,000 euros — no cheaper than a home stay in Britain.

Hosts can expect to earn several hundred euros a week. But Mrs Sanecka said: “This is something you can't do if you're only thinking about the money. You really have to love children to do it.'

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