Contrastive Analysis

Contrastive Analysis, "involves predicting and explaining learner problems based on a comparison of L1 and L2 to determine similarities and differences" (p. 34).  When I first read this, I thought that it made sense in that it was, "primarily pedagogical in nature: to increase efficiency in L2 teaching and testing."  As I read on, however, I found that it was creating predictions based on assumptions and it did not address the logical problem of language learning.  CA didn't produce its predictions and didn't account for learner errors.  I was mainly interested in this analysis because it seemed like it had such good intentions in the beginning, but failed to produce results.  I feel like I would be an advocate of this, but would then have to learn from it due to its failures.  It is one of the earlier theories and is one that we have learned from and developed because of it. 

Interesting Ideas

In the readings, I thought that the multilingual competence was one note-worthy to point out.  It is described as the compound state of a mind with two or more grammars.  What caught my attention with this was how English is the most common L2 language.  Why not another language? 

Another section in the reading I felt necessary to share was the stimulus-response theory.  It tells how children learn by imitation and that it is true that initial language learning can be due to this imitating of sounds.  However, many of these sounds are original and there isn't an explanation for it.  That baffles me and I found it very interesting.