ABSTRACT
In the 1980s, at about the time that Tom Wolfe’s novel The Right Stuff was made into a Hollywood film, an influential SLA book hit the market. Wolfe’s story is about air force test pilots who live by an unspoken set of standards and assumptions summed up as having ‘the right stuff.’ In her (SLA) book, sociolinguist Leslie Beebe writes about the role of input in language acquisition, and states that the key to successful language acquisition is for the learner to find ‘the right stuff ’.
