Oldal 25 [25]
CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS
follow a universal seguence in learning grammar regardless of their mother
tongue (“the natural order of morpheme acquisition”: see Dulay and Burt 1973,
1974, 1982). Dulay and Burt (1973) claimed that errors show the following
distribution according to their origin:
1. Interference-like errors 3%
2. Developmental errors 85%
3. Unique errors 12%
They pointed out that difference (contrast) is a linguistic phenomenon, while
learning difficulty is psychological, and the latter cannot be deduced automat¬
ically from the former; errors show no significant correlation with learning
difficulty. The new theory evaluated errors more positively: errors are inherent
in development, they mark the different stages of language acquisition, and we
do not necessarily have to prevent them. While contrastive linguistics placed
‘scientific learning materials’ at the center of the learning process, the theory
of creative construction placed the learner at the center and regarded learner
variability as a major factor in learning difficulty.
The error counts in various studies differed widely. According to Littlewood
(1984: 27), error analyses did not take into account the fact that very often
errors cannot be clearly attributed to one factor or another.
As a result of the criticisms levelled against CL, it fell into disfavour and
disuse in language pedagogy. In response to the criticisms, CL developed in new
directions. One direction was abandoning its practical orientation and devel¬
oping into a theoretical research field; another was taking on board the results
of such emerging linguistic disciplines as discourse analysis and pragmatics.
Within the area of second language acquisition research, classical contrastive
analysis was replaced by the study of crosslinguistic influences. This research
trend, initiated by Kellerman and Sharwood-Smith (1986), recognised that errors
can be caused by a variety of factors, and often multiple factors may contribute
to an error. While it was maintained that the mother tongue DOES have an
effect on L2 acquisition, it was also allowed that it is only one (although often
significant) factor among the sources of errors. At the same time, the effect of
the mother tongue does not always appear directly, automatically, but in complex
interaction with many other factors. This theory will be the topic of Chapter 2.
1.4 CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS IN SECOND-LANGUAGE TEACHING TODAY
Second-language teaching today is dominated by the communicative approach,
which does not pay too much attention to LI-L2 contrasts. At the same time,
many non-native language teachers believe that linguistic contrasts play an
important role in foreign language learning: some claim that without comparing
.23 e