Contrastive Linguistics And Second Language Acquisition

The human languages are arrangements of distinctive symbols that helps in communicating, conveying feelings and thought, stating facts or in addressing a certain idea about the language itself. Linguistics is ‘the scientific study of language and its structure, including the study of grammar, syntax, and phonetics.’ Linguistics can be divided into subfields such as psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, descriptive linguistics and much more. Contrastive linguistics is one of the many branches; it explores the similarities and differences between two languages or more on the same phonological, semantical and grammatical level.

The aim of this project is to examine the different aspects of English language acquisition on a certain division of

Cause of errors (intralingual or interlingual)

The targeted samples are those of both genders who receive an equivalent high school education, and are of the same age group. In order to keep my analytic data restricted to a similar range of ideas and lexical terms, I provided the students with specific questions about a particular topic. Moreover, the word count was limited to 150-200 words.

The system of methods used throughout this study aimed to gain close insights about the major errors and mistakes committed by second language acquisition learners. The primary data collected was limited to students of a particular age range in order to keep the analytic data restricted to a similar array of ideas and lexical terms.

Initially, some subjective questions were addressed to the students to provide a brief background about the individuals language. In addition, the answers to the questions provided helped in supporting the analysis carried throughout this project, as they are factors in affecting the acquisition and learning of the language. The first query required the age of the student, nationality, mother tongue, gender, languages spoken, personal desire to learn English and whether the school they attended was a private or public

A transfer of a lexico-semantic element is present on page 18A "heavy pranks". The cause of this error is by the literal translation of غشمرة ثقيلة to English. In addition, on page 8B is an intralingual error that is classified under the category of overgeneralization. Generalizing is a source of implementing one specific rule or aspect of grammar through an incorrect method. On page 8B is a coined word “conversate”, which might be an outcome of overgeneralizing the rule of changing the word class from a noun to a verb, e.g. negotiation(noun) to negotiate(verb) (conversation and