Contrastive

Analysis
Aleksandar
Grujić 68/13

5/11/2013
Introduction/Background

The Contrastive Hypothesis was created after the Second World War in 1950’s under heavy
influence from behavioristic and structualistic approach. It is based on the assumption that
the language system of one language is interfering with the system of the second language
which students are learning. The assumption which Contrastive Hypothesis asserts was what
made linguists to create the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis , which assumes that by
analysing and comparing two language systems it can be seen where the learner may counter
some difficulties and by doing that , the teacher can adjust his curriculum to minimise the
errors and the effort of the learner. If no interferences are detected in certain parts of the
language system , then it is expected that no problems in learning this particular part of
language will occur and the transfer of these language elements is expected. One of the
leading linguists of that time Robert Lado made a strong claim on which the whole
Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis was built upon (Lado 1957) : “ The plan of the book rests
on the assumption that we can predict and describe the patterns that will cause
difficulty in learning , and those that will not cause difficulty , by comparing
systematically the language and the culture to be learned with the native language and
culture of the student. " . Lado also mentions later that the comparison between two
languages is crucial to the foreign language learning and that those elements which are
similar will be easier to learn , and those elements that are different will be difficult.

How it works

Since it is mentioned in the previous paragraph what is the whole purpose of CA and how it
basically works, in this paragraph it will be explained which steps are taken in attempt to
compare two languages.

First , take two languages L1 and L2 (L1 being a mother tongue and L2 being foreign
language) and write down some main characteristics of it. Then we should select the areas or
some characteristics of the language to contrast since it would be too unrealistic to try and
contrast the whole language systems. For an example, we can take definite article the and
compare it with the equivalent of it in some other language. In Serbian, and in many other
languages, it does not have an equivalent so it can be assumed that people which learn
English as their second language will have trouble with it. In the prediction stage the
hierarchy of difficulty can be used to figure out how big of a difference is and how can the
problem be dealt with.

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Hierarchy of difficulty

The creators of the model for the hierarchy of difficulty were Stockwell, Bowen and Martin .
They created it in 1965 for phonological systems in contrast and they suggested eight levels
of difficulty . They were using very careful analysis of the characteristics of two languages
and they were able to make a pretty accurate list of phonological difficulties that a second
language learner could encounter. Later on, they contrasted a hierarchy of difficulty for two
languages in contrast , except this time it had sixteen levels of difficulty . They used same
principles as they did in their first language comparison and they added dimensions of
“structural correspondence” and “ functional / semantic correspondence” . In 1967 Prator
created a hierarchy of his own which had six levels of difficulty and it was applicable to both
grammatical and phonological

Level 0 – Transfer There is no difference between two languages as far as the certain item is
concerned. Hence , there is no barrier for the learner and he can transfer without any
difficulty a certain sound, lexical item , structure . Examples: If Serbian language is L1 and
L2 is English we have certain parts of the speech which are the same, the 1st , 2nd and 3rd
person can appear both in singular and plural.

Level 1 Coalescence – This is when two items in one language become one item in other
language . In this case the learner must put aside the item which he adapted and forget about
it while he is using the other language. Examples: in Serbian language words such as :doktor
and doktorica , have only one equivalent in English language – which would be : doctor

Level 2 Underdifferentiation . This is a case in which an item from native language is not
present in the target language . The learner must avoid this item . Examples: Serbian
language has cases of nouns : pas , psa , psu , psa , psu , psom , psu while in the English
language we will only find : dog .

Level 3 Reinterpretation – An item that is present in native language has a new form or
distribution in target language. Example: tenses in Serbian language are used in a different
way and there isn’t the same number of tenses. Also , there can be a mismatch between the
genders of the noun. One noun could be male gender and the other one could be female (this
creates great problems in translating songs and poems) .

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Level 4 Overdifferentiation – This is a case when we have a completely new item which
does not exist or it has little or no similarity to any item in the other language. In this scenario
the learner must adopt the new language item. Example: If L1 is Serbian and L2 is English ,
the learner will have to adopt articles , a different word sequence in Indirect Speech etc.

Level 5 Split – This is when one item in native language become two or even more items in
the target language , which forces the learner to make a new difference between items.
Example: The best example for this level of errors would be the tenses between Serbian and
English . While Serbian language has “Prezent” the English language has : Present Simple ,
Present Continuous , Present Perfect , Present Perfect Continous . The same goes for
“ Perfekat” and Past Simple, Past Perfect , Past Continuous .

Both the Stockwells and Prators hierarchies of difficulty were based on the on principles of
human learning . Obviously , zero degree is the lowest on the hierarchy of difficulty and thus
the easiest for the learner. This a one to one correspondence between the two languages , as
we move up from the zero level we are stumbling upon greater difficulty for a successful
transfer between languages . On level five on the hierarchy of difficulty the correspondence
becomes an interference.

Definitions of CAH

As it is mentioned in the introduction, the CAH is a hypothesis based on the belief that
contrasting two languages can benefit second language learning process by creating accurate
guesses on which items of the second language can be troublesome to learn. Depending on
the level of recognizing and diagnosing learners potential errors we expect from the CA , we
can split them in to three different versions: strong , medium and weak.

The strong version of CAH ,which was created by Wardaugh , assumes that we are able to
predict the items that will cause difficulties as well as the level of difficulty they will cause.
He claimed that this version of CAH is impractical and unlikely to completely work since it
would require from the linguist to have a complete list of clearly defined language patterns
which are universal for all the languages. Since linguists do not have any contrastive system
which can compare the two language systems and which can be solved like a math equation ,
it can be concluded that this version of CAH is highly impractical. Wardaugh was not the
only to criticise the strong version of CAH. One of the criticisms was made by Whitman and
Jackson who applied the CA as a tool to predict the items which will predict areas of
difficulty for Japanes learners of English. The predictions were used on a 40 item test of
English grammar with a goal of correctly guessing where the most mistakes will be made.

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2500 Japanese learners of English language took the test and the result showed that they did
not find any support for the claims they made previously based on CA. After this experiment
they came forth with a conclusion that CA is not capable in theory and practice to predict the
items with which the students could have problems.

The second very important criticism was put forward by Oller and Ziahosseiny who found
that learners who used a Roman script had more difficulties with English spelling then
students which did not use it. The strong version of CAH would have predicted that this is
where no or little mistakes would be made but it was proven not to be true. This situation in
which Roman Script users performed worse than non-Roman script user could be assigned to
the fact that non-Roman script users probably pay a lot more attention in learning writing
since it does not have a lot of similarity with their own script. This research proposed that
great difference between languages does not necessarily mean that big mistakes will occur
and that things which are almost identical can cause interference and errors. This could be
perceived as a medium version. The experiment which we just described emphasises the fact

that intralingual errors (those would be the errors within one language) are as a big of a factor
as interlingual (errors between two languages) errors in second language learning are.

Next, the weak version of CAH was created. Again , the creator was Wardaugh. This time , a
new version of CAH did not include mentioned levels of difficulty. Instead it acknowledged
the fact that there is interference between two languages and that they can create difficulties
in the learning process but the emphasis is on understanding from where the errors came from
and not on the level of difficulty interference has. It shifted the emphasis from prediction of
errors to influence . This weaker version of CAH is now known as cross-linguistic influence
. This cross-linguistic influence suggests that our previous experience has a part in learning
and that we must not take lightly the influence of our mother tongue on to the foreign
language learning.

The impact of CAH on language learning

It has already been noted in the previous paragraphs that CAH gave us an idea on how to
predict errors and how to contrast the two languages and what to do with it. Although the
success of this approach to error prediction can be disputed , the positive impact it had on
language learning can not be disputed. Perhaps the two best things that came out of the CAH
are Error Analysis and Markedness Differential Hypothesis . A rough outline of these two
will be noted.

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Error Analysis

The error analysis relied on the fact that all students in their language learning process make
mistakes and that they are an important part of that process. It acknowledges the fact that not
all errors made by student are made because of negative transfer between languages , and this
is why it superseded CA . One of the main characteristics of EA which should be noted is that
it recognised the difference between a mistake and an error . A mistake would be a “slip” or
a one time failure in performance, thus it is not something that keeps on happening. If this
mistake keeps on happening throughout the performance it is an error! Also , mistakes can be
self corrected while errors can not.

Markedness Differential Hypothesis

It tells that if we have a pair of similar items or functions , one is marked and the other one is
unmarked , the marked one will be harder to acquire. Also the marked item contains at least
one more characteristic that the unmarked , also , the marked item is used not as often as an
unmarked item. Thus, unmarked item has greater frequency of appearance in language .
Indefinite articles (a , an ) are a good example . In this pair , the article an is used less
frequently in language and is a marked form , while a is an unmarked form. Learners often
use a in places of an . And this is a common source of errors.

Conclusions and thoughts about CAH

Although we can see many flaws of the CA , teachers worldwide still find it useful in
understanding why do errors occur and helping their students in solving them. For an
example , phonological differences can be one of the easiest errors to predict. In one instance
of this kind of error we can find an German grapheme w which represents the phoneme /v/
but in English language it represents /w/ . So , an English speaker of German will
mispronounce “Volkswagen”. As we can see , although we are unable to completely contrast
two languages (even if we could it would take an extraordinary amount of time) , it can still
be used to help in some errors which occur , or at least to understand why some errors occur.
On the other hand, as we already mentioned , even if we had properly created categories
which we can compare between languages , it would take an extremely long time to do it.
Also, if we take in account the transformational linguists definition of language (which is
basically an assumption that the structures of language is infinite) , it is impossible to contrast
two infinite things. Another argument against CA was that it only created predictions and
contrast between languages but in language learning it is much more important the way
learner deals with it in production and understanding. To sum it up , it can be concluded that
CAH had a big impact on how we perceive language learning and it opened up doors for
some other approaches and studies of language learning.

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References :

1. http://www.scribd.com/doc/92196865/Language-Differences-and-Communication-
Contrastive-Analysis-Revisited
2. http://is.muni.cz/th/180075/ff_b/Thesis_2nd_draft.txt
3. http://www.ukessays.com/essays/languages/contrastive-analysis.php
4. http://www.csuchico.edu/~gthurgood/232/020_CA_presentation.pdf
5. Brown H.D (2000): Principles of language learning and Teaching , White Plains , NY
6. Tomasz P. Krzeszowski (1990) : Contrasting Languages : The Scope of Contrastive Linguistics ,
Walter De Gruyter , Berlin.