A
CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS IN
THEORY
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CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS
By
Associate Prof. Dr.TRAN VAN PHUOC
For
MA Students of English-Vietnamese Contrastive
Linguistics
Copyright by Tran Van Phuoc 2020
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1.INTRODUCTION:
WHAT IS THE NEED FOR CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS?
1.After the World War II, the interest in teaching
foreign languages increased in the USA …
2.Many linguists were concerned with the studies that
tries to predict
* the learning difficulties on the basis of comparing
the native language with the foreign language being
learnt, and also
* the study of bilingualism and language contact
phenomena.
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2.1.The program of contrastive linguistics was
instigated by Charles Carpenter Fries from the
University of Michigan in his book in 1945
Teaching and Learning English as a Foreign
Language published.
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His view was
* that the learner was likely to transfer rules about
language internalized from the learning of his/her L1 to
the L2, and
* that mistakes in the L2 were due to this inappropriate
transference.
* One could therefore prevent development of errors
through a prior contrastive analysis and error
analysis, leading to the development of appropriate
teaching materials to reinforce correct language
learning.
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Fries (1945: 9) contended that
“[t]he most effective materials [in foreign language
teaching] are those that are based upon
* a scientific description of the language to be
learned,
* carefully compared with a parallel description of
the native language of the learner”.
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2.2.Some years later, this project was put into practice
by Fries’ colleague Robert Lado (1957).
Robert Lado's formulation of the "Contrastive Analysis
Hypothesis" in his “Linguistics across Cultures”
(1957) is considered the greatest contribution in the field
of CA studies.
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3.The contrastive program was extensively put into
practice in the 1960s, most notably with the publication
of the Contrastive Structure Series edited by Ch.
Ferguson and published by the University of Chicago
Press.
• Explicit recommendations concerning the design of
teaching materials and syllabi were often made, e.g.
in the form of ‘hierarchies of difficulty’.
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4. The rapid ascent of contrastive linguistics in the US
culminated (=stopped) in the 1968 Georgetown
Roundtable. While the following years witnessed a
certain stagnation (=decrease) and even decline of
contrastive analysis in the US, the discipline gathered
speed in Europe, and several contrastive projects
were launched, most of them comparing English to the
native languages of the investigators.
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