INTAKE PROCESSES

Intake processes are the mental processes that occur when learners receive and make sense of new language input. Three key processes that underlie intake are inferencing, structuring, and restructuring.
Inferencing involves using existing knowledge and context to make educated guesses about the meaning of new language input. For example, if a learner hears the sentence “I left my keys in the car,” but doesn’t know the meaning of the word “keys,” they might infer from the context that “keys” refers to something used to open a car door.
Structuring involves organizing new language input in a way that makes sense in the learner’s mental grammar. For example, a learner might hear the sentence “I runned to the store,” and restructure it to “I ran to the store” based on their knowledge of past tense verb forms.
Restructuring involves making more significant changes to a learner’s mental grammar in response to new input. For example, a learner might initially produce sentences like “Me hungry” or “Me want cookie,” but through restructuring of their mental grammar, eventually learn to produce grammatically correct sentences like “I’m hungry” or “I want a cookie.”