Oldal 12 [12]
FOREWORD
Contrastive Studies at Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church from
2015 to 2020, the present author decided that it must contain some theory, but
should not be too theoretical. There is no point in having a course on the his¬
tory of CL and the details of the various theories proposed and refuted as well
as the long forgotten controversies surrounding the development of the disci¬
pline if the course has nothing to do with the original aim of CL, i.e. helping
foreign language teaching and learning. Developments in second language
acquisition research and the practice of second and foreign language teaching
have made many or most of the theoretical discussions on CL conducted in
the 1960s to 1980s irrelevant. Therefore, the aim of a course in CL must be to
acquaint students with those CL concepts that have retained their significance
over the years, and to focus on those L1-L2 contrasts that have actually been
found to impact learning. That is, a CL course should be about language con¬
trasts (in this case, Hungarian—English linguistic contrasts) rather than about
contrastive linguistics.
In view of the above, the original title of this coursebook (English—Hungar¬
ian Contrastive Studies) was changed to Hungarian—English Linguistic Con¬
trasts, and the subtitle A practical approach was added to indicate that the
course is designed to be of practical use, helping students to raise their meta¬
linguistic awareness and to directly improve their linguistic competence in
English. This endeavour explains the main features of this coursebook, in which
practical usefulness takes precedence over theoretical discussion. The book is
not a-theoretical: it does rely on linguistics and CL literature, including studies
on Hungarian—English contrasts (some of the author’s own), but it is not de¬
signed to be just another course in Linguistics. It tries to integrate as much
theory as necessary with practice: most chapters start with practical examples
to be discussed, and the various chapters consistently refer back to the basic
theoretical concepts presented in the first two chapters, and plenty of exer¬
cises are provided. It is hoped that studying Hungarian—English linguistic
contrasts in this way will benefit students more than a theoretical course would.
The first two chapters have been designed to give a summary of the most
important principles and concepts proposed by classical contrastive analysis,
highlighting those that have retained their relevance for foreign language
teaching over the years: concepts like divergent categories, transferability,
primary counterpart, etc. These two chapters provide the theoretical framework
that is needed to explain how linguistic contrasts may impact foreign language
learning.
Chapter 3 deals with contrasts between the Hungarian and English phono¬
logical systems. Upper-class students who have studied English phonology in
their first year must have had lots of information on this topic, especially if
they studied phonology from Nadasdy’s coursebook (Nadasdy 2006), so what
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