It could be argued that the various methods used to teach beginners are sometimes or often carried on longer than is useful. That is, non-communicative methods often continue to be used because the teacher's judgement is that his students can't use the language in communication after they have followed the beginners' course. This seems to have been the case with the Kenyan primary schools (mainly because of a complete absence of possible communicative materials as a result of poverty of resources in general). The teacher (or more commonly the administration) decides that this is because the students haven't mastered enough of the basic grammar. There must be many cases where students don't communicate, not because they haven't learned enough of the basic grammar, but because they have not been given suitable occasions in which to communicate. A common response to this has often been to repeat the grammar in the apparent belief that students need more instruction. Many school and industrial language courses#(17) are of this kind - repetition over and over again of the beginners' course with cosmetic changes at each "level". The English Block showed that students who had had very little experience of using the language communicatively - the primary course allowed little time for writing, and in the very large classes could not allow much time for speaking other than through class chanting - could, by making use of the grammar they had practiced, learn to communicate quickly even with a rather shaky knowledge of the structures and a not very firm grasp of meanings beyond a vocabulary of about a thousand words. Provided there were enough sources to imitate, the students were able to enlarge their repertoire. Krashen assumes his students will find sources of input in the native-speaker milieu. The English Block was a partial simulation of this milieu.
What about the Monitor hypothesis? This is much more speculative, as all theories about the functioning of the mind must be. However, it does seem likely that the actual process of the students' learning was largely unconscious, when the many occurrences of a linguistic form were noted by the student's unconscious mind and then assembled into a form he could come to use. The amount of conscious control of language learning is difficult to assess for the same reason that all other hypotheses about learning are hard to check. Krashen is probably right, in America, to draw attention to the effects on the mind other than those of conscious learning because it is a useful corrective to the neo-behaviourism which has dominated American language teaching practices.

I have observed a small child learning English as a second language while living in an English speaking family. There was a long period (about three months) when he seemed to be absorbing information by listening while not speaking. As he was not forced to speak English speech began to come at a moment which was suitable for him. Krashen points out that adult learners also behave like this though there is a great range of variation in the time different individuals need before feeling able to speak. This certainly bears out what Krashen says about a silent period when someone may listen and learn without speaking (he cites a cerebral palsy sufferer who spent years of his life (until he acquired a computer-controlled typewriter) listening and reading without being able to speak or write and then produced intelligent well-constructed letters.

The length of time students remain in a given stage is quite variable; some adult students are in early production after a few hours, while children (and some adults) may stay in the 'silent period' for several months .
(ibid. p.70)

In the English Block there was no teacher-controlled forced practice of forms which the students did not fully understand. Some of the problems caused by some methods of teaching may be due to forcing the use of, for example, an item of vocabulary before the unconscious mind of the student has processed it completely. The working assumption in the English Block was that a student's knowledge of a vocabulary item - or indeed any other linguistic item - was on a continuum from first acquaintance to fully expressible use and that only the student could "decide" (unconsciously) when to use it. This is not to say that a teacher might not suggest a word or expression if it seemed suitable when talking to a student about a piece of work. (An observant teacher should be able to guess, at least sometimes, when a student has a word almost ready to use. In that case a teacher's suggestion may be sufficient to bring the word up to a usable state. But this is suitable for a one-to-one encounter and can seldom be useful when a teacher is talking to a large group, as in a conventional class.)

Many African students have the desire to use words earlier than they are ready to and sometimes this has to be countered by a humorous campaign against "Dictionary Disease" - the habit of using long words after seeing them in the dictionary but without seeing them in use many times. Laughter is the best way of cutting this down.
Related to this is the problem of Arab students who, because of having been exposed to the translation method, often believe that every English word should have a direct Arabic equivalent. African students escape this probably only because there are no authoritative bilingual dictionaries in their mother tongues.

#(17)The Aramco Industrial Training Centre and the American Air Defense Academy courses are good examples.