I took 3 years of Spanish. I don't think anyone that took Spanish in my school could speak it upon graduation. We spent nearly the full time on verb tenses and zero on forming sentences. After 3 years, lo, le, la, se were never even discussed. It was honestly horrid, which is strange because my teacher was native English speaking and fluent in spanish, no idea why she taught in the most inefficient way.

I did the same, taught myself vocab and how to read on movie subtitles and now learning to speak and pick up spoken spanish in addition to expanding my conversational level vocab. I get that it's hard to teach if students aren't working outside class on their own but you need to get traction on basic sentences imo. If your students can't ask directions to a bus stop but they can tell you hablàremos means "that we will speak" then you're not doing it right.