Contrastive analysis - uni-jena.de（对比分析uni-jena.de）.pdf

Contrastive analysis Volker Gast 1 Introduction Narrowly defined, contrastive analysis investigates the differences between pairs (or small sets) of languages against the background of similarities and with the purpose of providing input to applied disciplines such as foreign language teaching and translation studies. With its largely descriptive focus contrastive linguistics provides an interface between theory and application. It makes use of theoretical findings and models of language description but is driven by the objective of applicability. Contrastive studies mostly deal with the comparison of languages that are ‘socio-culturally linked’, i.e. languages whose speech communities overlap in some way, typically through (natural or instructed) bilingualism. 2 Contrastive analysis and foreign language teaching Pairwise language comparison has been used in the description of foreign languages at least since the 19th century in Europe (cf. Fisiak 1981 for pertinent references). A contrastive perspective is also implicitly taken in traditional grammar writing based on the blueprint of Latin, whose linguistic system has often been superimposed on modern languages, thus implying an (asymmetrical) comparison. A contrastive methodology was explicitly formulated after the Second World War, when the importance of foreign language learning was recognized in the US, and when research on immigrant bilingualism emerged (Weinreich 1953, Haugen 1956). Charles Carpenter Fries, in his monograph on Teaching and Learning English as a Second Language (1945), contended that “*t+he most efficient materials 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” (Fries 1946: 9). The programme sketched by Fries was comprehensively realized a few y