One point for the discussion: learning to read is not the same as learning to speak. The latter is considerably more difficult.
And I don't mean: here's someone who was exposed to a large amount of English, and can now say a bunch of three word sentences. That's cheating. No, I want to see a large, representative group of people that haven't had any feedback on their speaking and writing during their learning reach almost error free, near-native fluency for a totally unfamiliar language (i.e., not an Englishman being exposed to French or a Mandarin speaker to Cantonese).
Edit: I looked up Krashen, but that looks like a hopeless case of academic hubris. E.g., this (http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/why_dont_educators...) is just full of it. And he got influence on education with his absurd ideas.
On a different note, for the one language that I did learn and used to be relatively fluent in after 6 years of taking classes in school (Spanish), I can still somewhat converse in via writing, but I can't speak it at all anymore really. They're totally different skills.