The Use of Contrastive Analysis in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at Tertiary Level

Abstract

Teaching English as a foreign language at university level is quite a different challenge compared to teaching high school or young non-native learners. This is due to the fact that university students are expected to acquire specific grammar terminology in order to master the grammar system of the target language. At the English Department of the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, during the first three (undergraduate) years of study the students are introduced to several grammar courses, focusing on the analysis of English grammar through descriptive explanations given in English. The courses serve as a basis which is expected to improve both grammar and translation competence of the students. This paper examines to what extent the acquired descriptive knowledge of morphosyntactic properties of English is helpful in terms of translation of those Bosnian sentences whose proper translation into English requires the knowledge of contrastive rules. The research has been designed as a combination of action research and a quasi-experimental pre-test (delayed) post-test control-treatment group. As the research findings have revealed, teaching grammar to non-native learners of English without input as to the contrastive differences between the source and the target language results in erroneous translation, which is a consequence of negative transfer from the source into the target language. On the other hand, grammar teaching supported by the presentation of relevant contrastive rules has proved to be an efficient learning technique in terms of reducing errors and improving both grammar and translation competence of non-native learners. Keywords: verb phrase, erroneous translation, transfer, contrastive analysis, pretesting, post-testing, treatment