Contrastive Linguistic Studies

What the learner needs to know and what the learner has to learn seem to be synonymous. However it is not necessarily the case. It may be the case that the learner already knows something of what he needs to know before he comes to the classroom. Obviously we need only teach him what he does not yet know of what he needs to know.
The language teacher does not teach language, he teaches a particular realization or manifestation of human language. It is his task to teach a new code, and those ways in which a selected range of already familiar functions can be achieved through its use. The learner already knows a great deal about language which is as true of the target language as of his mother tongue.

What the learner knows

The most obvious way in which differences between languages show themselves is in the mutual intelligibility of their speakers. That mutual intelligibility was not just a function of the linguistic relation between languages, but also had an important sociopsychological component. The other way in which the degree of differences between languages is apparent is in the degree of difficulty the speaker of one has in learning another.
The ease or difficulty of learning something is not simply related to the nature of the task but has components of motivation, intelligence, aptitude, quality of teaching and teaching materials; more importantly it depends upon the expectations the learner has of success.
In language teaching we have to do with at least two languages; the mother tongue and the target language. They may differ markedly in their lexical structure, for example in the semantic field of kinship terms or color terms but yet be similar in many syntactic respects. Linguistic similarity and difference cannot be asserted for 'languages as wholes' but only level by level, system by system, category by category.
Difficulty is a matter of psycholinguistic, while difference is linguistic. The learner does not know what parts of the target language he already knows. Nor can it be assumed that he will immediately discover correspondences by simple exposure to the data. He may all too readily assume similarities where they do not exist, because of misreading of the significance of what he hears or sees.

Similarity

Similarities between languages may be very general or abstract on the one hand. They are generally only partial, rarely complete. For example the English learner cannot by inspection immediately discover that the number system of German is similar to that of English.
There are two general points about comparison of languages; firstly, that within what is a broadly equivalent system in two or more languages the correspondences are very patchy and irregular, and consequently it is only at a more general and abstract level that we can expect to find equivalence or identify between languages, secondly that the absence of a systematically equivalent term in a target language does not in any way imply that the notions that are expressed by it in one language cannot be expressed at all in the other.

A basis for syntactic comparison

1. The noun phrases exemplifying the systems were translation equivalents, that is, there was an equivalence of meaning between the languages.
2. That the systems of contrast in each language were similar, we can call this formal equivalence between the languages.
3. That the terminology used for describing each language was the same i.e. the 'number' system singular, plural, count, mass, noun phrase, etc. this is equivalence of momenclature.

 Learners of second language do not have to learn how to formulate possible messages, they only have to learn how to express them, what is universal, then, is the semantic structure of languages; that is how possible messages are 'put together'.

The comparison of sound systems

Learning a language must therefore also involve learning the rules governing the organization of sounds in the target language. The learner of a language has to lean how the speaker of the target language perceptually organizes the range of sounds he makes and hears into groups and which distinctive features he pays attention to. Each language has a range of sounds by which it realizes its phonemes and the same sounds physically and articulatorily may realize different phonemes in different languages.
There are two ways in which we can compare the sounds of two languages; a) in physical, i.e. acoustic and articulatory terms and b) in functional terms.
Whatever phonological theoretical approach we adopt, it does not yield equivalent sets of categories for comparison, it is only in terms of the actual physical output of sounds, i.e. the physiological acoustic terms that we can make rigorous comparisons.
A learner must acquire the ability to produce and recognize the whole range of speech sounds or phones used by the speaker of the target language.
OK, see you next time...

Posted in: lecture,nonIT