Contrastive linguistics and language comparison

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ekkehard König
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Foreign Language Teaching ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Comparative Linguistics ◽  
Native Languages ◽  
Foreign Language Acquisition ◽  
Contrastive Linguistics ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

After receiving enthusiastic support during the 1960s and 1970s, the program of ‘Contrastive linguistics’ led a somewhat modest, if not marginal, existence during the two subsequent decades. The main reason for the apparent failure of this program was, of course, that the high hopes seen in its potential for making foreign language teaching more efficient were disappointed. Empirical work on the process of L2-acquisition from different native languages as starting points showed that contrastive linguistics cannot simply be equated with a theory of foreign language acquisition. A second problem was that a central aspect of the contrastive program, i.e. the writing of comprehensive contrastive grammars for language pairs, was hardly ever properly implemented. Finally, there was the problem of finding a place for contrastive linguistics within the spectrum of language comparison, relative to other comparative approaches to linguistic analysis. It is the third of these issues that is addressed by the present article. It will be shown that only by relating contrastive linguistics to other subfields of comparative linguistics and by delimiting it from them will we obtain a clear picture of its agenda, its potential and its limits.

scholarly journals Einflüsse der Linguistik auf den Fremdsprachenunterricht an polnischen Mittelschulen in den 60er und 70er jahren

2010 ◽  
pp. 103-119
Author(s):  
Anna Maria Harbig ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Foreign Language Teaching ◽  
System Reform ◽  
European Languages ◽  
The Usa ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact

The article presents linguistic theories of the 1960s and 1970s in the USA and Western Europe in the context of foreign language teaching and investigates their reception in Polish glottodidactics. The selected research subject are secondary school curricula for teaching English, French and German. A conclusion drawn on the basis of the analysis of the 1964 and 1966 curricula is that teaching West European languages was influenced by structuralism, British contextualism in particular. The curricula were characterized by a structural-situational approach expressed by the predominance of a spoken language, linguistic models’ situationalism and authenticity (dialogues in everyday life situations), a privileged position of syntax and the use of pattern drill. The analysis of the 1977 curriculum reveals a continuation of previous theoretical assumptions to a great extent. On the other hand, the impact of pragmalinguistics helped to include such issues as learner’s needs, focusing linguistic material on expressing intentions, or paying attention to language register and utterance adequacy, particularly in the context of linguistic errors’ evaluation. Even though the curriculum itself was not implemented into practice due to abandonment of the educational system reform, it formed the basis for works on curriculum in the 1980s. To sum up, it may be claimed that in spite of mostly unfavourable political conditions of the 1960s and 1970s, Polish glottodidactics aimed to maintain a contact with Western linguistics and attempted to transfer linguistic theories formed on its basis into foreign language teaching in Polish schools.

scholarly journals Vom Fremdverständnis zum Eigenverständnis: Kontrastive Linguisitik und Glottodidaktik

2011 ◽  
Vol 37 ◽  
pp. 7-18
Author(s):  
Hans-Jörg Schwenk
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Foreign Language Teaching ◽  
The Other ◽  
Correct Knowledge ◽  
Contrastive Linguistics ◽  
The One ◽  
The Given ◽  
The Relationship

The present paper deals with the relationship between contrastive linguistics on the one hand and foreign language teaching on the other hand, more precisely, with the influence exerted by the first on the latter. It goes without saying that a teacher who teaches his mother tongue is expected to teach it as completely and correctly as possible. Yet the complete and correct teaching of any language depends on the teacher’s complete and correct knowledge of the given language and, comes to that, his awareness of this knowledge. It could be shown and proven on various examples that this aim can only be reached by the way of analyzing an other / a foreign language and comparing it with the language / the mother tongue to be teached, that, as much as paradoxical this may sound, self-understanding quite often needs the understanding of the other.

scholarly journals Second language learning in knowledge forums: an analysis of L2 acquisition of students participating in the knowledge building international project

2019 ◽  
pp. 270-274
Author(s):  
Marni Manegre ◽  
Mar Gutiérrez-Colón
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Knowledge Building ◽  
Collaborative Writing ◽  
International Project ◽  
Computer Assisted ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Foreign Language Acquisition ◽  
Post Test ◽  
Working Together

This study presents the results of an experiment designed to determine whether knowledge building can facilitate foreign language acquisition. We examined how groups of Catalan students in secondary schools worked together on collaborative writing tasks in English, their foreign language. The students were participating in the Knowledge Building International Project (KBIP), which is based on the concept that students can learn while working together in computer-assisted learning environments. The quantitative data was collected through a pre-test and post-test. The pre- and post-tests were divided into four sections, which were grammar, vocabulary, long answer, and multiple-choice. The results show an increase overall in the performance of the foreign language, English. In particular, the analysis determined that the comprehension of the subject matter and writing abilities in the L2 showed an increase at high confidence levels, however, there are challenges in determining whether the students have acquired new vocabulary or developed a better understanding of grammatical rules, since it is difficult to predict which words and sentence structures they will use when participating in this project.

scholarly journals Difficult contrasts: an analysis of phonemic distinctions in the English of young Norwegian learners seen against the backdrop of incidental foreign language learning

2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
Kåre Nitter Rugesæter
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Foreign Language Learning ◽  
L2 Acquisition ◽  
Language Competence ◽  
Foreign Language Acquisition ◽  
Passive Exposure ◽  
Computer Based ◽  
State Schools ◽  
Made In

Norwegian children in the 21st century are quite massively exposed to English as an L2, primarily through subtitled television programmes, films and various computer-based activities. The article investigates to what extent this passive exposure influences their basic phonological competence in the L2 by analyzing their ability to actively distinguish between certain phoneme pairs in English which are considered difficult for Norwegian learners, mainly due to interference from the phonemic system in their L1. The data material was collected through 136 recordings of 11-16 year old pupils in ten Norwegian state schools. By comparing the results to similar studies made in Norway 20-35 years ago, at a time when young people's exposure to English was considerably more limited, the article discusses the effects of incidental foreign language acquisition on young people's L2 competence. The discussion is also placed in the light of recent, international research in this field. By critically investigating some of the findings of that research, the article furthermore attempts at problematizing the concept of L2 acquisition by focusing on the distinction between active and passive language competence. The findings indicate that basic L2 phonological competence is in no way automatically enhanced by passive exposure to the language. The article points to the necessity of structured teaching programmes to counterweight the complexity and variations in the L2 input that young people encounter in their media based exposure to the L2.

scholarly journals Polskie ekwiwalenty funkcjonalne leksemów brodino i mozzarella z włoskich kronik piłkarskich

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (XXII) ◽  
pp. 171-186
Author(s):  
Anna Godzich
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Foreign Language Teaching ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Educational Processes ◽  
Functional Equivalent ◽  
Contrastive Linguistics

This paper discusses the presence of food-related phraseology in Italian football language and Italian football chronicles and its Polish functional equivalents. The study demonstrates the significance of the relation between contrastive linguistics and applied phraseology as brodino and mozzarella have more than one functional equivalent in Polish. Brodino can be translated as strzał tylko do statystyk, zbyt lekki strzał, zbyt lekki strzał w sam środek bramki and mozzarella as niesatysfakcjonujący remis, niedosyt, ciężkostrawny podział punktów, zwycięstwo potrzebne z uwagi na trudną sytuację w tabeli, trzy cenne punkty. As the author indicates, the presence of food-related phraseological units in Italian football terminology proves that culture-related aspects are crucial to master the target language. Hence, the role of such terminology in transla-tion of specialist and journalistic texts and the role of phraseological competences in the process of foreign language teaching should be highly important in educational processes.

INTEGRATING POETRY INTO THE FOREIGN LANGUAGE CLASSROOM FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tatiana Savchenko
Keyword(s):  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Foreign Language Teaching ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Foreign Language Acquisition ◽  
Language Classroom ◽  
Poetic Text ◽  
Poetic Texts

The article deals with the theoretical foundations of foreign language acquisition which are related to the integration of poetic texts into foreign language teaching. The article defines poetic text and its role in foreign language teaching and focuses on the selected foreign language acquisition theories and their interconnectedness with using poetic texts in the teaching of foreign languages.

Translation oriented corpus-based contrastive linguistics

Babel ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 381-393 ◽  
Author(s):  
Riyadh Khalil Ibrahim
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Use ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Foreign Language Teaching ◽  
Contrastive Study ◽  
Translation Quality ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Contrastive Linguistics ◽  
The Relationship

The paper aims at studying the relationship between contrastive linguistics (CL) and translation as branches of applied linguistics, on one hand, and the use of computer corpora (C.C) on the other. It also stresses the fact that the boundaries of CL have been redrawn to incorporate the output of C.C in performing various tasks in translation, that goes beyond the traditional methods of CL carried out exclusively on solving problems in foreign language teaching (FLT). The paper supports the call for the manipulation of data obtained from CC in contrastive linguistic projects for the betterment of translation quality. Previously, CL was concerned with linguistic systems rather than language use, but with the introduction of corpora, language use become more easily accessible and the field of CL has expanded. The access to huge amounts of original texts and their translation in electronic format is of great benefit to professional translators, since a wide range of translation solutions for any particular source language are available by a gentle hit on the required tagging key. As for translation-oriented corpus based CL it becomes obvious that the actual contrastive study will be carried out in order to obtain data for explaining the various phenomena in translation. Hence, translation as a communicative event can assume a fully-fledged descriptive discipline if it manages to develop its own descriptive tools of study. Computer corpora can play a decisive role in turning translation into a well-established academic discipline.

scholarly journals Folk proverb - as a national and spiritual wealth

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Khamdamova Gulshan Khamraevna
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Foreign Language Teaching ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Comparative Linguistics ◽  
Depth Study

Comparative linguistics is the linguodidactical basis of foreign language teaching. Therefore, the study and analysis of foreign languages ​​in comparison with the native language is one of the important issues for linguistics in our country. In modern linguistics, including comparative linguistics, an in-depth study of proverbs is important. As a result, paremiology, the study of proverbs, has emerged as a separate field in linguistics

scholarly journals Fostering foreign-language teaching at university by developing students’ autonomy: The exploratory experiment

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 137-149
Author(s):  
Karine Chiknaverova
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Teaching And Learning ◽  
Communicative Competence ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Rank Correlation ◽  
Foreign Language Teaching ◽  
Foreign Language Acquisition ◽  
Statistical Relevance ◽  
Exploratory Experiment

This article addresses the issue of activation of the process of foreign-language acquisition by means of fostering students’ autonomy. The author characterises and analyses the nature and components of foreign-language communicative competence and autonomy. It proceeds with justifying the appropriateness of using particular diagnostic tests and specifies the components of autonomy that are manifested during foreign-language teaching and learning at university. The methods employed include statistical relevance check based on the criteria of Mann–Whitney, Wilcoxon rank correlation, analysis by Spearman and factor analysis. The findings confirm the interconnection between intensity and quality of students’ foreign-language communicative competence development and their autonomy. The research identifies three levels of foreign-language communicative competence and the levels of autonomy corresponding to them. The article concludes with an outline of the stages following the exploratory experiment and further recommendations.   Keywords: Learners’ autonomy, foreign-language communicative competence, monitoring learners’ autonomy, foreign-language acquisition, English as a second language.

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