Chapter 1 - Input and Intake Revisited
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Summary
Reflections on 'Input' and 'Intake'
In the field of applied linguistics, and more specifically in the field of second language acquisition, the terms 'input' and 'intake' can be traced back several decades. Corder (1967: 165) was the first to use the term 'intake' as distinct from 'input' in his renowned quote:
The simple fact of presenting a certain linguistic form to a learner in the classroom does not necessarily qualify it for the status of input, for the reason that input is 'what goes in' not what is available for going in, and we may reasonably suppose that it is the learner who controls this input, or more properly his intake.
In the 1950s, Skinner (1957) and Chomsky (1959) had already made reference to these same phenomena without proposing the specific terms 'input' and 'intake'. At that time, the debate focused on the degree to which external factors influenced language acquisition, or rather, whether an internal innate structure, known as Universal Grammar guided language acquisition (cf. Chomsky, 1959, 1965). In his criticism of Skinner's work in which Skinner reflects on the notion of 'stimulus' (the environment) and 'response' (individual behaviour), Chomsky remarks that, 'We cannot predict verbal behaviour in terms of stimuli in the speaker's environment, since we do not know what the current stimuli are until he responds' (Chomsky, 1959: 32). In other words, we cannot know what the individual has taken in until the moment of response, leaving an important gap in our ability to observe language processing.
Decades later, Hatch (1983: 81) reflects on this distinction between input and intake:
If we wish to keep both terms, we may say that input is what the learner hears and attempts to process. That part that learners process only partially is still input, though traces of it may remain and help in building the internal representation of the language.
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- Foreign Language InputInitial Processing, pp. 3 - 28Publisher: Multilingual Matters
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