This is one of those scales-fall-from-my-eyes moments. Looking back, I think I must have known that something was wrong with how we were taught languages -- although in my case, a great deal was right with it, too -- but I really never would have put it all together if Prof. Anthony Esolen hadn't pointed it out. He writes:
Sometime in the 1970's, the aim of teaching languages changed pretty noticeably, and therefore also the range and the kinds of languages taught. In my small Catholic high school, we had full curricula in French, Spanish, German, and Latin, and the school allowed you to take Latin instead of History, if you were taking another language besides. The goal -- which was, shall we say, never entirely settled -- was to get you to be able to Read Good Things in the other language. But eventually, that goal would be abandoned, for the sake of a fluency in conversation which you were really never going to attain without being immersed in the language somewhere for many months. The practical result was this: In 1960, you might study Spanish to read Don Quixote. In 1980, you studied Spanish to ask where the bathrooms were in Tijuana. In 1960, you might study German to sing the great Lieder that Schumann or someone set to music. In 1980, you studied German to order ein Glas Bier in Heidelberg. In 2000, you didn't study German at all. In 1960, you might study Latin to read Cicero. In 1980, you might study Latin to gain 60 or so points on your verbal SAT; because obviously you couldn't order Falernian wine in Mediolanum. In 2000, you didn't study Latin at all.
I began to notice very early in my teaching career (1985) that students could have four years of a language in high school and still not know the first thing about grammar. It meant that after all that time, they could sputter out a few stock phrases, but they could not read a newspaper, and forget about reading a real novel. If it can't be imagined as being said at a restaurant or a train station or a booth at a flea market, forget it.
Strange, though, that they were spending four years apparently studying A LANGUAGE -- apparently -- but never studying LANGUAGE, how it works, what it does, how we pronounce things, how we hear things, how it helps us organize things, how it is almost necessary for us even to have any kind of thought. They were expected to learn a language at age 15 in the same way they might have learned it at age 2, when the circumstances were completely different, both outside them and inside them. And the conversational technique shoved aside every other way, every other inroad, every other necessarily artificial but still illuminating tool for understanding.