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“I found that it was difficult or impossible to teach an Indian to make phonetic distinctions that did not correspond to ‘points in the pattern of
his language’ however these differences might strike our objective ear, but that subtle, barely audible, phonetic differences, if only they hit the
‘points in the pattern’ were easily and voluntarily expressed in writing.” p. 62
In Sound Patterns in Language 1925, Sapir explains that the habits of a native speaker are part of a system which is orderly organized. He also underlines
the importance of phonemes points in the pattern which are different from phones phonetic entities. Sapir’s view paved the way for the introduction of
structural linguistics. Fries brought Sapir’s views into his classroom activities, paying special
attention to his students’ mistakes, both in pronunciation and in writing. After a series of observations, he came to a conclusion that a certain group of students had
a tendency to make similar mistakes. He noticed that the students who spoke Spanish, for example, could not pronounce certain English words correctly. They
pronounced speak as [espik], study as [estadi] and school as [eskul]. Students from the Philippines also made mistakes, but they showed different patterns. They
pronounced the three words above by inserting [e] between the consonant sequence. Thus, speak became [sepik], study became [setadi] and school became
[sekul]. Then, Fries related ‘the patterns of mistakes of his students’ to the ‘points in the pattern’ of Sapir. The result is an idea which gave birth to the so-called
contrastive analysis.
2.1.8.2 Purposes of CA
Comparative Linguistics and Contrastive Analysis have one thing in common: both attempts to compare languages. However, there is a basic difference between
the two. Comparative Linguistics tries to group languages into language families, PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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whereas Contrastive Analysis endeavors to discover similarities and differences between the first language L1 and the second language L2 for the
improvement of teaching and learning of a foreign language. In 1945, Fries, who is recognized as the father of CA, in his book Teaching
and Learning English as a Foreign Language emphasized : The most efficient materials grow out of a scientific descriptive analysis
of the language to be learned carefully compared with a parallel descriptive analysis of the native languages of the learner. Only a
comparison of this kind will reveal the fundamental trouble spots that demand special exercises and will separate the basically important
features from a bewildering mass of linguistic details p.2. Almost twelve years later, Robert Lado, one of Fries’ prominent followers,
proposed a similar view in his book, Linguistics Across Cultures 1957, saying: “The most important new thing in the preparation of teaching materials is
the comparison of native and foreign language and culture in order to find the hurdles that really have to be surmounted in the teaching p. 3
Fries and Lado made CA very popular in the 1950-s and 1960-s. The popularity tempted CA proponents to put forth several claims, some of which are
considered overambitious such as the following: 1. mistakes of a learner are primarily due to interference from L1.
2. similar points in L1 and L2 do not cause problems for a learner. 3. different points in L1 and L2 cause serious problems for a learner.
4. different points in L1 and L2 are detected from a comparison of L1 and L2. 5. results of the comparison form the basis on which difficulties are predicted.
6. materials designed on the basis of the comparison of L1 and L2 are useful.
2.1.8.3 Movement Against Contrastive Analysis
A movement against CA emerged in the closing year of the 1950-s. Some scholars from the Great Britain began to cast their skepticism on CA.
