Language Learning - What Is It?

i was a german assistant, and i taughte pupils who were 14, 15 so at gcas e level. My job was to ask them questions which were on a long list of about three pages. They always had to answer the questions with three sentences, so they really learnet it by heart. Soifit wasn't really language learning, it was more preparing for the exam. And sir, that's what i found quite funny. But actually it's not really helpful. Yes, they could just get through the exam. It was just all right, let's take this box and get jumped through this hoop here"