Whither Contrastive Analysis?

Abstract

In its original form Contrastive Analysis (CA) came to be accepted both as a theory of second language learning (SLL) and, more importantly, as an organizing principle around which to plan for second language teaching (SL T) in classroom, or formal, learning environments. As Stem (1983) has aptly put it: "Contrastive Analysis was not intended to offer a new method of teaching; but it was a form of language description which was particularly applicable to curriculum development, the preparation and evaluation of teaching materials, to the diagnosis of learning problems, and to testing." The Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH), or the view that the native language (NL) is a template used by the learner for deciphering and organizing the linguistic and communicative categories of the target language (TL), was shaped initially by the intellectual Zeitgeist of structuralism in linguistics and behaviorism in psychology. It was Charles Fries (1927, 1945) who entrenched this view during the forties, claiming that the unconscious transfer of NL structural and lexical patterns to the learning of the TL produced characteristic errors in those areas of the TL where such patterns were divergent or nonexistent. In so doing, Fries founded applied linguistics as an autonomous branch of general linguistics (see Danesi, 1985). Then in 1957 Fries' student, Robert Lado, established the basic procedures of CA which led, in the sixties, to a widely-acclaimed contrastive analysis series edited by Charles A. Ferguson and published by the University of Chicago Press (Kufner, 1962; Stockwell & Bowen, 1965a, 1965b; Agard & Di Pietro, 1965a, 1965b). This series demonstrated that CA could be expanded to incorporate changing views of language design.