Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis, Interlanguage

The main idea of contrastive analysis, as propounded by Robert Lado in his book Linguistics Across Cultures (1957), was that it is possible to identify the areas of difficulty a particular foreign language will present for native speakers of another language by systematically comparing the two languages and cultures. Where the two languages and cultures are similar, learning difficulties will not be expected, where they are different, then learning difficulties are to be expected, and the greater the difference, the greater the degree of expected difficulty. On the basis of such analysis, it was believed, teaching materials could be tailored to the needs of learners of a specific first language. Lado himself was an English and Spanish bilingual, who was born in America of Spanish parents, grew up in Spain and then went to college in the USA. He was all too aware of the importance of cultural difference in mastering a foreign language. However, his appeal to compare cultures was not taken up, and in practice contrastive analysis focussed on a surface comparison of languages, starting with the sounds, then the grammar and finally and only selectively the vocabulary. This emphasis reflected the focus of American linguistics at the time, which was still very much under the influence of structuralism as espoused by the great American structuralist Bloomfield in Language (1933). Structural linguistics viewed language as a rule-governed system which could be separated into hierarchically arranged sub-systems, each of which had its own internal patterns and structure. The lowest level in the hierarchy was phonology, then morphology, then syntax. The lexicon received scant attention from structuralists and the discourse level of language was quite ignored. In fact, structural linguistics coped best with closed or finite linguistic systems, and, for this reason, deliberately excluded semantics from its description. Bloomfield’s (1933: 140) conclusion that “the statement of meanings is therefore the weak point in language study, and will remain so until human knowledge advances very far beyond its present state” is often quoted. In the period immediately after World War II there was renewed interest in language learning and language teaching in the United States, and efforts were made at the University of Michigan to apply the ideas of structural linguistics to language teaching, perhaps most influentially by Charles Fries (1945). The approach to language teaching advocated by the Michigan School laid great emphasis on the principled selection and grading of linguistic items for instruction. It was essentially an analytic, atomistic approach, which took a language apart in order to then put the parts back together again in their logical order during the teaching process, and in this sense it claimed to be scientific. Lado himself actually studied at the University of Michigan with Fries, and contrastive analysis became the basis for the strict selection and grading of material for teaching which was characteristic of language courses at the time. Fries advocated a bottom-up approach to language learning from phonology to morphology to syntax with vocabulary being held to a minimum: