[clivehawkins]

Yes, I agree. Probably too young for swear words in any language. I probably wouldn't even have admitted that I knew what it meant as by refusing to translate it you may have aroused their curiosity even further. I had one case where a boy had learnt a new word and would say it whenever he could. To shut him up I told him that he could repeat it for us all when his mother came to pick him up at the end of the lesson - shut him up a treat!

With older students (18+) I'd deal with it as it came up - I use a lot of authentic materials such as songs, magazine articles, blog entries etc and you see a fair bit of it. I'll always remember one guy who used W****R a lot. The problem was that he always pronounced it wrongly, with an 'o' as in 'hot' rather than 'a' as in 'cat' - whenever on a rant or wanting to be particularly emphatic he'd say the word and people would just laugh at him. I had to take him to one side and actually drill it as I couldn't bear to see him being laughed at any more! True story.