"Corder (1967) made a significant observation in his seminal paper about how input is perceived in the process of L2 acquisition. His insight later became one of the cornerstones in input-related research. He discussed the notion of intake:
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. The fact that not all the available data in the learner’s environment can be absorbed and used in building the learner’s IL grammar presents one conundrum, and the condition that would enable the conversion of input into intake has been a central point of research. Corder’s comment also shifted the way SLA researchers perceived input: from a strictly external phenomenon to the interface between the external stimuli and learners’ internal systems. Discussions on learners’ developmental readiness, teachability, and other cognitive factors thus came to the fore.... The common consensus in the field of SLA is that what input learners are actually able to use for developmental purposes will depend on their current state of knowledge. Following this acknowledgement, however, it remains unclear exactly what mechanisms and subprocesses are responsible for the input-to-intake conversion. The models described below will provide some insights into this question..."
Teasers
"As a midpoint summary, the models reviewed so far, proposed by Chaudron (1985), Sharwood Smith (1986), and Gass (1997), converge on the necessity of comprehensible input (or comprehended input, in Gass’s term). Learners must be able to decode enough of the input to formulate a conceptual representation, through which linguistic structures can be called upon from current competence and be compared with the external and apperceived structure. Paradoxically, but perhaps not incompatibly, there must also be incomprehensible input—some extra bits of linguistic forms that cause a mental jolt in processing. Had everything in the input been completely understood, learners would generally feel no need to attend to forms, and acquisition ofmissing structures would not occur. In other words, because ofthe incomprehensibility of the input, learners’ attention is drawn to the specific structure. Then cognitive comparison between IL representation and external representation would take place, which would eventually lead to acquisition..."
"Carroll (1999, 2000) makes a clear distinction between processing for parsing and for acquisition. It is exactly when the parsers fail that the acquisitional mechanisms are triggered—a view that is somewhat aligned with the notion of incomprehensible input. But instead of using a very general notion of noticing the gap and cognitive comparison, Carroll spells out the sequence of restructuring and enhances the understanding on this somewhat vague area. Namely, during successful parsing, rules are activated in each processor to categorize and combine representations.
Failures occur when the rules are inadequate or missing. Consequently, the rule that comes closest to successfully parse the specific unit would be selected and would undergo the most economical and incremental revision. This process is repeated until parsing succeeds or is at least passable at that given level. This procedure explains the process of acquisition, where the exact trigger for acquisition is parsing failure resulting from incomprehensible input...
Continuing with the discussion of comprehensible and incomprehensible input, Carroll (2000) contradicts the way Gass (1997) conceptualizes and sequences input-processing in her model. Gass conceives of intake as a subset of comprehended input. However, according to Carroll’s logic, comprehension involves the extraction of meaning to form conceptual representations, and conceptual representations are, by nature, open to introspection. According to Jackendoff (1987), they are the format in which we think. If the stage of intake follows\ comprehended input (which is comprised of these conceptual representations), it may imply that intake and any further mental comparisons are also open to introspection. Carroll argues that this scenario might be flawed: the theoretical concept of the black-box LAD does not include conscious introspection. Empirical support has not yet been provided for learners being able to utilize conscious comparison during online processing..."
"Synthesizing all the above views, Chaudron, Sharwood Smith, and Gass’ stance on attention is not actually incompatible with Carroll’s. One possible explanation for this apparent disagreement is that it is an artifact of the way each researcher conceived input processing: Each researcher created his/her model based on a different starting point of processing. More importantly, the diverging views actually highlighted the importance of attention, and it may be so prevalent that it operates before the initial processor, within the processor, and as a result of processing, as suggested by the various models. The importance of attention has already been researched with great interest, as seen in Schmidt’s (1990) Noticing Hypothesis…"
Input Processing in Second Language Acquisition: A Discussion of Four Input Processing Models
Yayun Anny Sun
https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/do ... 6/D8348JX3