Abstract:
Intake is a concept that has long fascinated second language researchers as it provides a window onto the crucial intermediary stage between input and acquisition. A better understanding of this intermediary stage can help us to distinguish between input that is used for immediate (e.g. communicative) purposes only and input that is drawn on for learning. This article traces the different components from which intake can occur, reviews existing definitions of intake and suggests alternatives for its operationalisation.
Machine summary:
The second part of the article looks at how learners extract linguistic information from this data and considers a crucial stage in the input-to-acquisition process, namely intake.
Beebe (1985) argues that what constitutes input is determined to a large extent by the learner: Studies of input in second language acquisition must view non-native speakers not simply as passive recipients of comprehensible or incomprehensible input from native speakers, but as active participants in choosing the target language 2 This appears to differ somewhat from the commonly held view in cognitive psychology that ‘stimuli’ are ‘anything in the environment we respond to’.
Positive and negative evidence Research has shown that the input learners receive does not provide all the information they need to learn a language.
The first of these is psychological complexity and refers to the extent to which ‘the language learner must re-order and re- arrange linguistic material in the process of mapping underlying semantics onto surface 5 It has to be pointed out that the participants in the study were at an upper-intermediate level and reported high motivation for learning English.
Loschky & Bley-Vroman (1993) see intake for communication as depriving the learner of the potential for feedback and thus a chance to notice a difficulty with his/her performance: Thus, it may be possible to (1) comprehend native speaker input, or (2) make one's interlanguage output comprehensible to a native speaker without (3) focusing on or using the target form of instruction.