Contrastive analysis: An overviewGraham Thurgood (ENGL 232) 57 Contrastive analysis: An overview Moulton's Audiolingual slogans 1. A language is speech, not writing.2. A language is a set of habits.3. Teach the language, not about the language.4. A language is what native speakers say, not what someone says they ought to say.5. Languages are different. Contrastive Analysis (= CA) In the 1940s to 1960s before the SLA field as we know it was established, Charles Fries (1945:9) wrote:"The most efficient materials are those that are based upon a scientific description of the languageto be learned, carefully compared with a parallel description of the native language of the learner." Robert Lado, Linguistics Across Cultures, 1957: "Individuals tend to transfer the forms and meanings and the distribution of forms and meanings oftheir native language and culture to the foreign language and culture — both productively and when attempt-ing to speak the language and to act in the culture and receptively when attempting to grasp and understandthe language and culture as practiced by natives." (1957, in Gass and Selinker 1983, p. 1) Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (= CAH) CAH - This extension of the notion of CA attributed the ability to predict errors to a CA of two lan-guages, a predictability that practitioners associated with the degree of similarity between the two systems Robert Lado (1957:2) "…those elements that are similar to this native language will be simple for him, and those ele-ments that are different will be difficult" The mainstream of CA: The bulk of the SLA field was concerned, however, with prediction of errors:The simplistic model:The most simplistic version was the belief that linguistic differences based simply on similaritiesand differences alone could be used to predict learning difficulties. Thus, the following quote:A simplistic prediction:"Where two languages were similar, positive transfer would occur; where they were different, negative transfer, or interference, would result."Graham Thurgood (ENGL 232) -58-More sophisticated models:Stockwell, Bowen, and Martin's 1965 The Grammatical Structures of English and Spanish. Uni-versity of Chicago.This goes beyond simple lists of similarities and differencesHierarchy of Difficulty:They had a hierarchy of difficulty as part of their analysis, with the most difficult at the top and theleast difficult at the bottom.This model is more sophisticated: The Stockwell, Bowen, and Martin model, unlike the Lado model, does not predict the greatest dif-ficulty in the new and missing categories. Examples of problems predicting:Buteau (1970:138), for instance, found that for English speakers learning French 'the French sen-tences that correspond literally to their English equivalents are not necessarily the easiest to learn'Type ofDifficulty1. Split2. New3. Absent4. Coalesced5. CorrespondenceExample porfor paramarking grammatical genderDo as a tense carrierhis/her is realized asa single form su-ing = -ndo as acomplement with verbs of perceptionL 1 English;L 2 Spanish xx yø -- --- ---> xx -- --- ---> øx yyx -- --- ---> xStockwell, Bowen, and Martin: Hierarchy of DifficultyGraham Thurgood (ENGL 232) -59-Psycholinguistics (Osgood 1953)"When two sets of materials to be learned are quite different or are easily discriminated by thelearner, there is relatively little interaction, that is, learning one has little effect upon learning the other. Ifthey are similar in such a way that the learning of one serves as partial learning of the other, there may befacilitation, or positive transfer. If, however, the similarities either of stimuli or responses are such thatresponses interfere with one another, then there will be greater interference as similarity increases."Behaviorism: Language acquisition as habit formationAs the discussion of Audiolingualism mentioned, Contrastive Analysis was associated with behav-iorism. Initially, this association with behaviorism gave CA academic respectability, providing a theoreticalfoundation for the approach.Problems for the CAH version However, the CAH version of CA, that is, the predictive version ran into some problems.1. Association with behaviorism:-1959 Noam Chomsky's classic review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior, in which Chomsky seriouslychallenged the behaviorist view of language. CAH, intimately associated with behaviorism, got caught inthis discrediting of this view of language.2. Mispredictions:Specifically, the supposed ability of CAH to predict errors was not supported by the facts.hit and miss predictions it underpredicted, that is, it failed to predict some errors;it overpredicted, that is, it predicted some errors that failed to occur;of course, it also got some rightWhy?As Long and Sato (1984) pointed out, one cannot depend upon the analysis of a linguistic productto yield meaningful insight into a psycholinguistic process.Note CAH failed, not CAThe failure discussed thus far is the failure of CAH, not the failure of CA.Strong vs. weak versions of CAWardhaugh (1970) proposed a distinction between the strong and the weak version of the CA. The strong version [CAH] predicts apriori . The weak version deals with learner errors and uses CA, when applicable, to explain them, a poste-riori , that is, after the fact. In fact, this was the beginning of error analysis, that is, the detecting of the source of errors.Error Analysis (= EA)Of course, CA survived. No one can deny that the L 1 influences L2 performance.Thus, the next approach was to limit the analysis to the examination of errors that students actuallymade.Graham Thurgood (ENGL 232) -60-This, however, had its problems.Language acquisition as rule formationUnder the influence of Chomsky's theory of language acquisition, researchers began studying thespeech of children learning English as their L1. They attempted to use these to write a grammar of what thechildren were producing.So-called "rule formation":*She doesn't wants to go.*I eated