Comprehension-led approaches to language instruction are much harder to pull off in a classroom because they rely on direct interaction between the native-speaker and the teacher. Therefore, the ideal ratio is one-to-one as in the language nurturing relationship between an infant and parent.
Infants learn language in a comprehension-led approach. From infancy through to adulthood, a person can always understand more than he can say in his native language. (Caroline Bowen posted a very helpful article on the stages of childhood language development called Ages and Stages). Our receptive vocabularies should exceed our expressive vocabularies in order for proper and fluent language interaction to occur.
Why shouldn't it be similar when we learn languages as adults? Why do we tend to treat adult language acquisition differently than native language acquisition?
Here is one possible answer that came to my mind:
We believe children are inherently better at learning languages than adults, so we don't expect the same results from adults. Therefore, when adults don't speak a second language with ease we don't think to blame it on the approach.
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