up to the intermediate level. As Wagner-Gough and Hatch (1975) have pointed out, the "outside world" is usually unwilling to provide the adult with intake. Children acquiring second languages often do have the advantage of receiving real intake, but adults may not. Consider this conversation between a 5-year-old ESL acquirer and an adult:

    Adult                               Paul
Is this your ball?                    Yeah.
What colour is your ball?             (no answer)
Is that your doggy?                   Yeah.
Is that your doggy or
   Jim's doggy?                       Jim's doggy.
                                 (Huang, cited in Wagner-Gough, 1975)

In this exchange, the requirements for intake are clearly met. Paul's responses indicate that he understands much if not all of the speech directed at him (thanks, perhaps, to the adult's adherence to the "here and now" principle), it is simple input, most likely at or near the level Paul needs in order to acquire more English, and it is quite natural. Compare this to the input that the older acquirer needs to deal with. As Wagner-Gough and Hatch point out, the language is quite complex, displaced in time and space, and probably incomprehensible to acquirers such as Ricardo, a 13-year-old acquirer of English as a second language:

         Adult                                Ricardo
What are you gonna do tonight?        Tonight? I don't know.
You don't know yet? Do you work
    at home, do the dishes or
    sweep the floor?                  Water...
Flowers.                              Mud.
Oh. You wash the mud down and all
    that. What else do you do
    at home?                          Home.

                     (Butterworth, 1972; cited in Wagner-Gough, 1975)

Despite this sort of behavior from native speakers, there may be useful sources of intake outside the classroom. One resource is the foreign student peer group. The language our ESL students direct at each other may come quite close to meeting the requirements for intake. Their communication with each other is certainly natural and usually understood, and the presence of peers who are slightly more

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