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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 automatically 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 developing 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
