LANGUAGE IN INDIA

A Comparative and Contrastive Study of Preposition
in Arabic and English

Yahya Mohammed Ali Al-Marrani, Ph.D. Candidate

Abstract

This paper attempts a comparative and contrastive analysis of the subsystems of the prepositions in Arabic and English, in terms of their uses, function and meanings in order to find the major similarities and differences between Arabic and English and to account for any possible deviations that may characterize the performance of Arabic learners.

The result showed that there are similarities and differences between these two subsystems of the prepositions in Arabic and English. The similarities between them facilitate the development process of learning a foreign language (positive transfer), whereas differences make learning process of a foreign language difficult and Arabic learners make many mistakes (negative transfer or interference).

This study has pedagogical implications for teaching prepositions in English and to help teachers and motivate them to describe and analyse the learners' errors and also to prepare remedial exercises to eliminate the errors their students make in the use of prepositions.

Key words: prepositions, comparative, contrastive, similarities, differences

1. Introduction

Contrastive linguistic analysis (CA) is the comparison and contrast of the linguistic systems of two or more individual languages in order to bring out points of contrast as well as points of similarity between them.

Contrastive analysis is not intended to offer a new method of teaching, but it is a form of language-description across two languages which are particularly applicable to curriculum development, the preparation and evaluation of teaching materials, the diagnosis of learning problems and testing. Johansson and Hofland (1994:25) state that "language comparison is of great interest in a theoretical as well as an applied perspective. It reveals what is general and what is language specific and is therefore important both for the understanding of language in general and for the study of the individual languages compared".

Schuster (1997) indicates that English learners of German or German learners of English are destined to have a positive transfer because the two languages do have many similarities. On the other hand, the theory stipulates that learning will be quite difficult, or even unsuccessful, when the two languages are different.

Contrastive linguistics is not a unified field of study. The focus may be on general or on language specific features. The study may be theoretical, without any immediate application, or it may be applied, carried out for specific purposes.

Contrastive linguistics is a predictive technique. This means that by looking at the structure of two or more linguistic systems, we can predict the difficulties the learner is likely to encounter. It doesn't mean that for all mistakes a learner makes in the second language, the first language habits alone are responsible. Contrastive analysis is useful in discovering language universals, studying problems in translation and studying language types.

2. History of Contrastive Analysis

Contrastive analysis is not a new idea. The beginning of contrastive linguistics was marked by the publication of Robert Lado's Linguistics Across Cultures (1957).

In the first chapter of this book Lado discusses four important points of the fundamental assumptions that led to the necessity for a comparison between two languages to explore both the dissimilarities and similarities of the two linguistic systems compared, the significance of contrastive analysis for testing and the significance of contrastive analysis for research.

3. Comparative and Contrastive Linguistics

A comparative and contrastive linguistic analysis differs considerably from a contrastive linguistic analysis. A comparative study is a diachronic comparison of two or more linguistic systems with a view to classifying languages into families. It is concerned with the history and evolution of languages. A comparative study is interested in establishing the similarities or correspondences between languages.

A contrastive linguistic study is a synchronic comparison. It studies languages belonging to the same period, without paying much attention to their histories or language families. It is more concerned with dissimilarities than similarities.

4. Lado's Approach to Contrastive Linguistics

Lado (1957) was concerned with the concept of difficulty in language learning. Starting out from the commonsense observation that the learner will find some features of a new language difficult and others easy, he argued that the key to degrees of difficulty lies in the comparison between the native and the foreign language he is learning. Since an individual tends to transfer the features of his native language to the foreign language he is learning, a comparative study will be useful in identifying the likeness and differences between the languages and thus enable the linguist to predict areas of difficulty for the second language learner. He suggests that contrastive analysis is very useful for a teacher who teaches a foreign language because it helps him in identifying the problems that a foreign language learner may experience in the learning process.

Lado (1957:2) states that "The teacher who has made a comparison of the foreign language with the native language of the students will know better what the real problems are and provide for teaching them."

The most important new thing in the preparation of teaching materials is the comparison of the native language and the foreign language and culture in order to find the hurdles that really have to be surmounted in the teaching.

The first point taken by Lado in his book Linguistics Across Cultures was the statement given by Fries that has a connection with preparing materials. Fries (1945:9) points out that "the most effective materials are those that are based upon a scientific description of the language to be learned, carefully compared with a parallel description of the native language of the learner".

According to Lado's approach, contrastive analysis is very important in curriculum development, the preparation and evaluation of teaching materials, to the diagnosis of learning problems and to testing.

Lado's study was programmatic. It outlined procedures of how to make such comparison in phonology, grammar, vocabulary and the cultural aspects of language.

5. Criticism Levelled Against Contrastive Analysis

There were different types of criticism that were levelled against the hypothesis of contrastive analysis. There were empirical criticism, practical criticism and theoretical criticism.

Different studies on second language learning proved that the first language habits are not alone responsible for all the mistakes a learner makes in second language.

One of these studies was an empirical study under taken by Randal Whitman and Kenneth Jackson (1972) (cited in Littlewood, 1984). It used four different contrastive analyses of English and Japanese, in order to predict the errors that would be made by Japanese learners of English. They compared these predictions with the errors actually made by the learners in a series of tests. Their conclusion was that contrastive analysis was of little use in predicting the items which proved difficult in their tests.

Practical experience suggests that many errors made by learners would not have been predicted by contrastive analysis. Heidi Dulay and Merina Burt (1973) identified in their study two kinds of errors, namely, interference errors and developmental errors.

The behaviourist approach claims that we can predict difficulties and errors by contrastive analysis. But Chomsky (1957) criticized the behaviourist approach and described its inadequacy. So this criticism by Chomsky is a theoretical criticism against contrastive analysis.

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