ontrastive Error Analysis
The diversity of claims regarding their applications, CA,EA and IL also differ from one another in a number of respects-in theirtheoretical assumptions, methodologies, the nature and scope of dataconsidered relevant in each area, the kind of insights they provide into thenature of TL learning, and in the implications of the studies carried out forpractical classroom teaching and materials preparation.It is the purpose of this chapter to present a "state of the art" in each f these areas of research from the point of view of the "one goal" explainedabove. In particular, with respect to each field of study, we shall examine thecurrent trends in theory, methodology, claims and empirical validationsthereof and its contribution to TL teaching. The following discussion isorganized in four parts-the first, second and third parts deal with CA, EA andIL respectively and the last part is the conclusion. There will be a good dealof overlap among the sections, but this is unavoidable given the fact that thethree fields have developed at times as rivals, and as complementary to oneanother at other times.
Contrastive Analysis
Although several prominent linguists and pioneers in the field of TLpedagogy, including Henry Sweet, Harold Palmer and Otto Jespersen, werewell aware of the "pull of the mother tongue" in learning a TL, it was CharlesC. Fries who firmly established contrastive linguistic analysis as an integralcomponent of the methodology of TL teaching.

Declaring that the mosteffective materials (for foreign language teaching) are based upon a


scientific description of the language to be learned carefully compared with aparallel description of the native language of the .learner (1945, p. 9),Fries may be said to have issued the charter for modern CA. In doingso, he also made the first move in what has turned out to be one of the mostspirited controversies in the field of foreign language teaching, namely onthe role and relevance of CA, but more on this later (see Sections 1.7 and2.2). The challenge was taken up by Lado, whose work
Linguistics Across Cultures
(1957) soon became a classic field manual for practical contrastivestudies. The Chomskyan revolution in linguistics gave a fresh impetus to CA,not only making it possible for the comparisons to be more explicit andprecise, but also giving it what seemed to be a more solid theoreticalfoundation by claiming the existence of "language universals" (but cf. Bouton1976). The volumes of
The Contrastive Structure Series
(e.g., Stockwell andBowen 1965" Stockwell, Bowen and Martin 1965) represent this phase of CA. The chapters from the three conferences on CA held at Georgetown,Cambridge, and Stuttgart (Alatis 1968, Nickel 1971a, Nickel 1971b,respectively) present scholars as, by and large, optimistic about thepossibilities of CA. But by early 1970s, CA was already open to attack onboth external grounds (of empirical validity) and internal (theoreticalfoundations), leading Selinker to wonder that CA was still thriving "at aperiod when a serious crisis of confidence exists as to what it is" (Selinker1971, p. 1) and Wardhaugh to forecast a "period of quiescence" for it(Wardhaugh 1970). CA today, however, is not entirely on the defensive-not


only do "messages of hope" keep appearing from time to time (e.g.,Schachter 1974, Wode 1978), but even the proponents of alternateapproaches (EA and IL) implicitly or explicitly incorporate CA in theirmethodology (see Section 3.5). If anything, the controversy seems to haveclarified the possibilities and limitations of CA and its place, along with othercomponents, in the task of accounting for the nature of the learner's performance.