Contrastive Analysis

Contrastive Analysis (CA) was a hypothesis pioneered in the late 1950s by Robert Lado and his book Linguistics Across Cultures. CA was developed to examine the differences between two languages in an effort to identify problem areas for language learners. At this time, behaviorism and structuralism (structural linguistics) were predominate in the field of language learning. The psychological theory of behaviorism, which proposed that people learned languages through habit formation (Stimulus-Response-Reinforcement), and structural linguistics, which accesses the different structures in language, were the two driving forces behind the teaching method Audio Lingual Method (ALM).

It was assumed that second language learning was dependent upon transfer from the native language to the one being learned. If the languages shared the same structural elements, order, and meaning, then positive transfer would occur and assist in learning. However, if structural elements, order, and meaning did not translate appropriately, then this could cause negative transfer or interference which was believed to cause difficulty in learning a second language.
The idea of positive and negative transfer meant that a detailed examination of the two languages needed to be undertaken to identify where students would have problems. By examining the languages and identifying the problem areas, educators could then predict the elements of negative transfer and drill these elements to form the “correct” habit. In this way, behaviorism, structuralism, and CA all worked together to inform the educator of which components needed more attention.
A bottom-up approach to learning was conceived where the smaller aspects of the language were learned before higher order aspects. For example, the educator would first teach phonetics so the students could learn all the sounds of the new language. Then, the next step would be something higher such as lexicon or morphology. If one looks at pyramid diagram of language, the smaller fundamental parts of such as phonetics would be on the bottom, whereas discourse would be at the pinnacle.
The Results
CA failed miserably. The hypothesis’ ultimate goal was to help educators find areas where negative transfer would be problematic and predict errors learners would make; however, that was never able to be realized because it could not predict where students would have problems. CA could not account for students having the same instruction but progressing at different rates. If instruction and transfer were causes for learning, then why wouldn’t students consistently attain the same level?
Also, examining languages for areas of interference led to many puzzling classifications that made predicting problems convoluted. Some examples are: same meaning but different form, similar form but different meaning, same meaning and form but different distribution, etc…
Although CA failed to produce the results it strove to provide, it still lives on today, but on a more conceptual level in regards to communication.

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