CL, thank you for your comprehensive thoughtful response and valuable citations.
The only possible pedagogical support for LYCE techniques that I can suggest would be CLL, community language learning.... where the target community is Liyang's nationalist view of China beseiged by Western culture and where the 'robot computer' who is used purely for translation purposes is, of course, the inadequate foreign 'teachers' that LYCE selects to model 'North American' English.
If every Chinese student had consistant access to competent caring English teachers, foreign or otherwise, that were truly educated in language teaching techniques in a classroom with fewer than 20 students then there would be no market for LYCE, or for that matter, any of the other deplorable private schools which infest this wonderful country.
Even a competent teacher, faced with university classes of 50 students, where only a handful of students have adequate listening skills and the personal confidence to fully participate, and where perhaps a dozen students have neither the ability nor inclination to stay awake, can only, I believe, try to reach the 'middle class' (sic) and somehow nurture in them the qualities of those superior students. Those 'star' students will continue to succeed in their language acquisition and will maddeningly pursue every foreign teacher anyway.