Contrastive analysis and its relevance to language teaching

Abstract

In the course of learning a second language, learners regularly produce utterances in speech and writing which judged by the rules of the second language are erroneous, or ill-formed. Traditionally the attitude to errors was that they were an indication of the difficulties that the learners had with certain aspects of the language, which could be explained by the persistence of the habits of the mother tongue and their transfer to the new language (Lado, 1957). Errors were the result of interference and in an ideal teaching situation could be avoided. From this notion has developed the whole industry of “contrastive linguistics”, with research projects and regular publications of results in a number of countries, including South Africa.