Contrastive Linguistic Studies

What the learner knows

Language teacher need to teach his/her student about what the student does not yet know of what s/he needs to know. Some students might have known about something that they need to know before they come to the class. Language teaching always starts when student/learner has already achieved his/her mother tongue because s/he will know about the formation rules or the code of his/her mother tongue. Of course it will help the student to learn L2 better. So, it is very important for students to understand their L1 first before they start to study L2.

It is possible that languages which are unrelated may resemble each other in their formation rules, features and their systemic structure. So the first language or L1 will help students to learn L2 by comparing the structure of both languages. Some elements that are similar with the L2 will be simple and easier for students. That is why L1 is important for those students who want to learn L2.

Difference and Difficulty

There is evidence that something totally “new” or different may prove easier to master than something which is only slightly different. When there is a very similar sound exists in the two languages but in different phonetic environments, there may be a grater learning problem than there is a totally new sound. At this point, we can simply note that difficulty is clearly a psycholinguistic matter and difference is linguistic matter. To learn a better L2, a learner has to learn the differences between the two languages (L1 and L2), but s/he also needs to discover the similarities between the two.

Similarity

Some words might semantically similar in two languages, but sometimes they do not necessarily function syntactically in the same way. For example, particular lexical words which are translation equivalents in the two languages do not always belong in the same class of noun. A greater degree of morphological similarity will be found in the number systems of English and French. Written French marks its plural with –s, or –x, and this is very similar with English.