Contrastive Analysis

Contrastive Analysis对比分析Step 1 DefinitionContrastive Analysis is the study and comparison of two languages. It helps us to distinct what needs to be learned and what does not need to be learned in a second language acquisition.Step 2 The goal of Contrastive AnalysisThe goal of Contrastive Analysis is to predict what areas will be easy to learn and what areas will be difficult to learn.Step 3 Analyze the native language and the second language As we all know, Chinese are our native language and English as our second language. So here, I will mainly analyze the learning of Chinese and English from several aspects.A.The universality between the learning of Chinese and EnglishThe foreign linguistics once pointed that listening and speaking occupy the 70 percent of the studying of any kinds of language, while reading and writing are only 30 percent. In a word, the language learning should listen and speak firstly, and then start to read and write. Therefore, we should associate the listening and speaking with reading and writing in language learning.The general characters between Chinese and English learning state that Chinese plays important roles in the course of English languageacquisition, though we don’t have enough about what roles it actually plays. The study of the roles that Chinese plays is known as the search of LANGUAGE TRANSFER.However, Chinese may have positive or negative effects on the learning of English. Therefore, there are both positive transfer and negative transfer. For example,➢Chinese: 我喜欢英语。

他喜欢英语。

➢Japanese: 彼は英語が好きです.➢English: I like English. He likes English.From structure, it is easier for Chinese to learn English than Japanese. From grammar, there is no change of “喜欢”, but English is different. So, Chinese will interfere the learning of English in this perspective.Another common character of Chinese and English is that the development of written English is much faster than the development of oral English. Now, more and more new words are emerging. So, we should be familiar with t hese new words. Such as, “MicroBlog” and ”微博”, etc.B.The individual characters between the learning of Chinese andEnglishThere also several individual characters between the learning of Chinese and English:First, speaking is not equivalent to the writing in Chinese learning. In contrast, English is not the same as. The best advantage of English is we can learn many new words from a simple word by adding prefixes, suffixes, or roots. Knowing the basic knowledge, we can write the word when listening at most occasions. According to this, we can remember words by listening and speaking. We can remember the words more permanently compared with remember ordinarily. For example,Nation → national, nationalism, nationalize, international,internationalism, internationalizationWe can remember at least seven words from adding different affixes to the one word.Second, another prominent individual character of English is the use of preposition. Some experts said that Chinese is the language of verb, while English is the language of preposition. There are not many widely used prepositions in English, but actually they play a very important role in English. For example,He ran for president. 他竞选总统。

He ran across the president. 他偶然遇见了总统。

These two sentences express two kinds of meanings because of the two different prepositions.Third, the uses of intonation in these two kinds of languages are different. For instance, the rising tone of “yes” mean the affirmation, andthe falling tone may mean “what”. In Chinese, different tone s of “ma”may have many different words.Fourth, the individual characters exit in writing. This difference in writing between Chinese and English remains us to avoid using our Chinese writing style in English composition.C.The differences between the learning of Chinese and EnglishAs is known to all, our native language is actually acquired by us instead of learned. But the English is definitely learned by us. Another difference is that we learn Chinese in a Chinese speaking environment, however, English is not. Also, we seldom use it in our daily life.From above all, we know we should create an environment of English learning in order to learn English easier.D.Chinese learning may help the education of EnglishAs for us, we may use English to educate our students or our children in the future. At that time, we had better let them to acquire the English instead of learning.Step 4 Repeat the importance of CAIn a word, Contrastive Analysis helps us learn second language easier and help us to educate others in a better way.。