Contrastive Analysis (CA) or Contrastive Linguistics: "In the study of foreign language learning, the identification of points of structural similarity and difference between two languages" (Crystal, 1992, p. 83). "Contrastive analysis was developed and practiced in the 1950s and 1960s as application of structural linguistics to language teaching" (Richards, Platt & Platt, 1992, p. 83). CA describes similarities and differences among two or more languages at such levels as phonology, grammar, and semantics.
The study began in Central Europe before the Second World War and developed afterwards in North America. In the United States in the late 1950s, Robert Lado proposed contrastive analysis as a means of identifying areas of difficulty for language learners, although already in 1945 Charles Fries had formulated the theory. The earlier contrastive analysis research was language-focused. During the pre-Chomskyan structuralist period, linguists examined features of the native language which contrasted with features of the foreign language, indicating that these would be areas most likely to cause difficulty for foreign language learners. By the early 1970s, this contrastive analysis theory had been to an extent supplanted by error analysis, which examined not only the impact of transfer errors but also those related to the target language, including overgeneralization (Bowen, Madsen & Hilferty, 1985, p. 58). In the late 1970s, Schachter and others resuscitated a weak form of contrastive analysis, demonstrating the limitations of error analysis in such matters as avoidance of unfamiliar structures (Schachter, 1974). Typical of such avoidance is the Japanese avoidance of the relative clause in English, rather than facing the difficulty of constructing it.
"The identity hypothesis asserts that the acquisition or availability of one language has little or no interference on the acquisition of another language. The contrastive hypothesis...