Input to Output: Chapter 2

Once again, I came into reading this chapter with a mindset that the chapter's focus on "input" would be somewhat simple, knowing that this is a general overview of SLA. I'm humbled again as this is not an easy concept to grasp upon diving deeper. During my reading, I asked one of the questions in upper right hand corner out loud to myself: "How do learners get linguistic data from the input?" Ask a child this question and they might come up with the same initial answer I thought: they just do. VanPatten points out how different it is to learn a language than it is to learn anything else because when one learns how to count or about the batting average of their favorite baseball player, they do so through language. Learning how to make connections between what are really arbitrary symbols, sounds, words, and data is just a tiny bit of what makes learning a language so challenging and different than learning other content.