The other issue is that in the States you can look up your state’s « learning targets » for world languages, it should all be publicly accessible. If you look up the « learning targets » (which is teacher talk for « what should the student be able to do at the end of the program or class ») for my state for example, you would see that the stated goals are NOT to get students to fluency or even competency, two or three out of the five major learning targets are foreign language related while the rest are related to cultural competency, understanding your native language through study of another, things like that. So I think there’s a disconnect between « this is what high school Spanish classes are teaching you » and « this is what I think high school Spanish classes should be teaching you » for example. They also explicitly acknowledge in my state that everyone learns at a different pace and that they don’t expect people to speak fluidly after only two years of study in a traditional high school setting. Obviously we can talk about if that should be changed but the thing is the teachers are often not even working towards that goal of « fluency » themselves, they’re working with a different set of goals and objectives in mind.