Contrastive analysis is the systematic study of a pair of language

Language

Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...

s with a view to identifying their structural differences and similarities. Historically it has been used to establish language genealogies

Language family

A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term 'family' comes from the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a...

.

Contrastive Analysis and Second Language Acquisition

Contrastive Analysis was used extensively in the field of Second Language Acquisition

Second language acquisition

Second-language acquisition or second-language learning is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the name of the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process...

 (SLA) in the 1960s and early 1970s, as a method of explaining why some features of a Target Language

Target language

Target language may refer to:*Target language, in applied linguistics and language education, the language which a person is learning, also called second language*Target language, in translation, the language to which a source text is translated...

 were more difficult to acquire than others. According to the behaviourist theories prevailing at the time, language learning was a question of habit formation

Habituation

Habituation can be defined as a process or as a procedure. As a process it is defined as a decrease in an elicited behavior resulting from the repeated presentation of an eliciting stimulus...

, and this could be reinforced or impeded by existing habits. Therefore, the difficulty in mastering certain structures in a second language

Second language

A second language or L2 is any language learned after the first language or mother tongue. Some languages, often called auxiliary languages, are used primarily as second languages or lingua francas ....

 (L2) depended on the difference between the learners' mother language (L1) and the language they were trying to learn.

History

The theoretical foundations for what became known as the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis were formulated in Lado

Lado

The word Lado can refer to;* A Haryanavi superhit Film of 2000, starring Ashutosh Rana & Rajeshwari.* The Lado Enclave of the Congo Free State, in modern South Sudan...

's Linguistics Across Cultures (1957). In this book, Lado claimed that "those elements which are similar to [the learner's] native language will be simple for him, and those elements that are different will be difficult". While this was not a novel suggestion, Lado was the first to provide a comprehensive theoretical treatment and to suggest a systematic set of technical procedures for the contrastive study of languages. This involved describing the languages (using structuralist

Structuralism

Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...

 linguistics), comparing them and predicting learning difficulties.

During the 1960s, there was a widespread enthusiasm with this technique, manifested in the contrastive descriptions of several European languages, many of which were sponsored by the Center of Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC. It was expected that once the areas of potential difficulty had been mapped out through Contrastive Analysis, it would be possible to design language courses more efficiently. Contrastive Analysis, along with Behaviourism and Structuralism

Structuralism

Structuralism originated in the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the subsequent Prague and Moscow schools of linguistics. Just as structural linguistics was facing serious challenges from the likes of Noam Chomsky and thus fading in importance in linguistics, structuralism...

 exerted a profound effect on SLA

Second language acquisition

Second-language acquisition or second-language learning is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the name of the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process...

 curriculum design and language teacher education, and provided the theoretical pillars of Audio-Lingual Method

Audio-Lingual Method

The audio-lingual method, Army Method, or New Key, is a style of teaching used in teaching foreign languages. It is based on behaviorist theory, which professes that certain traits of living things, and in this case humans, could be trained through a system of reinforcement—correct use of a trait...

.

Criticism

In its strongest formulation, the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis claimed that all the errors made in learning the L2 could be attributed to 'interference' by the L1. However, this claim could not be sustained by empirical evidence that was accumulated in the mid- and late 1970s. It was soon pointed out that many errors predicted by Contrastive Analysis were inexplicably not observed in learners' language. Even more confusingly, some uniform errors were made by learners irrespective of their L1. It thus became clear that Contrastive Analysis could not predict all learning difficulties, but was certainly useful in the retrospective explanation of errors.