From Input to Intake: Researching Learner Cognition

The distinction between input, what the teachers say to their learners, and intake, what the learners hear, has been recognised in research into second language acquisition at least since Corder (1967). The distinction is important because language development does not result from the input to which learners are exposed but what the learners take in. If a teacher in a class focussing on the past simple says “Harry and Megan cooked a curry last weekend,” the input that the learners are exposed to is “Harry and Megan cooked a curry last weekend.” However, if a learner hears “Harry and Megan cook a curry last weekend” then this sentence, in all its non-standard grammaticality, is the intake and this episode is unlikely to contribute to the learner’s command of the past tense. If, for example, researchers were interested in identifying the number of instances of the past tense needed for learners to acquire this tense, research that counted the number of times the teacher used the past tense will only help us to understand the acquisition process if there is a systematic relationship between what the teacher says, the input, and what the learner hears, the intake. However, the conceptual distinction between input and intake in second language acquisition (SLA) has been poorly operationalized and much research treats input as a straightforward proxy for intake. This article explores the relationship between input and intake in order to identify strategies for researching language development that are based on a more solid understanding of the connections between input and intake.