It’s odd that fl teachers who promote explicit grammar study tell us that it’s understandable and acceptable that students at the end of 4 years of study cannot express themselves or even understand L2 but will show their proficiency once they are in-country.
The communicative teacher says grammatical accuracry will come with use b/c the learner first has to build an internal model of L2. Use of L2 will get to the point that issues of syntax, word usage, collocations, morphology, etc. will be stored along with the early-acquired patterns.
The question is, can we live with both approaches to language learning or is one superior to the other in some way. cognitively, socially, academically?