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The Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis
The Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis
In the 1950s, the study of second language acquisition (SLA) was largely based on the contrastive hypothesis (or 'contrastive
analysis hypothesis', CAH). According to this hypothesis, interference was a main source of errors in the process of second
language acquisition. On the basis of a behaviourist view of language acquisition (stimulus-and-response model),
the contrastive hypothesis regarded instances of interference between L1 and L2 as a result of (linguistic) habits that were
transferred from the mother tongue to the language to be learnt. Accordingly, the contrastive analysis implied that most of the
errors made by learners could be predicted by carefully comparing the two languages under comparison (similar language
patterns => positive transfer; different language patterns => negative transfer) (Ellis, Rod. 1986. Understanding Second
Language Acquisition. 2nd, Improved Edition. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, p. 22.) Practitioners of contrastive linguistics at that
time mainly aimed at improving foreign language teaching on the basis of a pairwise language comparison.