Perhaps I'm being naieve and simplistic (what - again?), but I always wonder why we don't pay more attention to the way in which children gain mastery of their mother tongue.

It is a case of immersion, yes, but there's the process of learning labels for things to start with. Then they start stringing words together to make clumsy and faulty sentences to say things that are useful to them. They have no idea what verbs and cases are - they just use them.

The city I live in is a melting pot of cultures and languages, and I have been toying with the idea of starting a conversational English session at my church. Dealing with real life scenarios: food, shopping, music. Learning by observation the words associated with these things and then applying them.

Years ago, my (Afrikaans) next door neighbour asked me to help her daughters master conversational English. We did things like bath my baby, work in the garden, bake biscuits, apply for membership of the library, buy ice-creams... all in English.

Sure, to start with, their sentences were abominably scrambled, but so were my kids' when they started to speak English... and it was their mother tongue, so why would I expect anything different from a second language learner?

I confess I'm not a language teacher (my original focus was speech), so I'm probably overlooking something fundamental.