SUMMARY

This meeting deals with : Criticisms of The Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis, Empirical and
Predictability Of Errors, Theoretical Criticisms, Practical Criticisms, and Contrastive Pragmatics. This
discussion includes an account of the current reappraisal of ‘ interference ‘, which once again seek to
allocate an important role the L1 in SLA.

1. Criticisms of The Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis Ellis, Rod ( 1985: 25-41 )

The criticisms that gathered force in early 1970s were of three major types :
First, there were the doubts arose when researcher began to examine the language
learner in depth, concerning the ability of contrastive analysis to predict error. Second,
there were a number of theoretical criticisms regarding the feasibility of comparing
language and methodology of contrastive analysis. Third, the ‘crisis’ in contrastive
analysis was the result, therefore, of empirical, theoretical and practical consideration.

2. Empirical and predictability of errors

Dullay and Burt ( 1973, 1974 ) set out to examine errors issue empirically to
psycholinguistics origins such as : interference like error, i.e. those errors that reflects
native language structure and are not found in FLA data, first language development
errors, i.e. those do not reflect native language structure but are found in FLA data,
ambiguous errors, i.e. those are not be categorized as either interference-like or
developmental, and unique errors, i.e. those that do not reflect first language structure
and also are not found in FLA data.

3. Theoretical criticisms

Theoretical of behaviorism account also helped to create a ‘crisis ‘ in contrastive

analysis. However, the role of the L1 was reappraised which has two forms, the
contrastive analysis hypothesis and multi-factor nature of learner errors rejected out of
hand.

4. Practical criticisms

The final set of criticisms concerns whether contrastive analysis of any practical
worth to language teacher. Contrastive analysis was predicted on the need to avoid
 errors, but if errors is seen as a positive aspects then the importance of devising a
teaching program geared to its prevention becomes less obvious, so identification is a
much weaker use of contrastive analysis than prediction.

 Reappraisal which takes two forms, the nature of language transfer and
contribution made by L1.

 Language transfer re-examined has three noteworthy developments of the

contrastive analysis hypothesis which recognized as avoidance instead of errors.
Empirical evidence take place when three was some similarity was total
difference, and errors was the multi-factor phenomenon and interference as one
of the factors.

 Avoidance which study by Scatcher ( 1974 ). He investigated the relative clause

produced by adult L2 learners from different language background. Although
contrastive analysis fail to predict production errors, but it might be successful
in predicting comprehension errors and avoidance of structure.

 A multi-factor approach which requires identifying the relationship three set of

factors in the acquisition of various L2 items.

 L1 interference as a learner strategy. The nation of strategy is incompatible with

the behaviorist psychologist’s instance on examining only observable events.
While the nation of interference with its behaviorist connotation may need to be
rejected, but the nation of intercession is an important part of any general theory
in SLA.

5. Contrastive Pragmatics

Contrastive pragmatics is not just comparing the communicative function of

different language, but it also comparing how different language express the same
communicative functions. The universality of communication system is highly probably
that all languages have some way of making polite request ( e.g. could you help me,
please? ), but they are likely to differing in formal ways in which the function express.