We examined case-marking variation in heritage Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian. Comparing heritage to homeland Polish and Ukrainian speakers, we found only a few types and a few tokens of systematic distinction between heritage and homeland varieties. A total of 6,291 instances of nouns and pronouns were extracted from transcribed conversations…

Muysken argues for four general "strategies" that characterize language contact phenomena across several levels of description. These strategies are (A) maximize structural coherence of the first language (L1); (B) maximize structural coherence of the second language (L2); (C) match between L1 and L2 patterns where possible; and (D) use…

This study investigated second language (L2) learners' acquisition of English /t, d/ deletion patterns in word-final consonant clusters, (a) focusing on how constraints such as grammatical conditioning and phonological environment affect deletion of /t, d/ in L2 acquisition and (b) determining the extent to which these L2 learners had acquired…

Presents longitudinal data from simultaneously bilingual German-English children with respect to development of negation and syntactically related modal particles. Data provide evidence for both language separation and cross-linguistic influence. Relative order of verbs and sequential modifiers appears not to be a principled syntactic operation,…

This work asserts that contrastive analysis should be regarded as a technique of research and not limited to error prediction and material preparation. Introductory observations are made on the state of the field, the domain of contrastive analysis, contrastive analysis and transfer, and contrastive analysis and foreign language instruction. In…

Spanish-speaking learners of Portuguese often transfer features of Spanish language to Portuguese. Learner errors, including those caused by Spanish interference, are analyzed by contrasting Portuguese and Spanish grammar. (SW)

AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE GRAMMATICAL SYSTEM OF A FOREIGN LANGUAGE GIVES THE BEGINNING STUDENT A FOUNDATION UPON WHICH THE BASIC SKILLS CAN BE DEVELOPED. THUS, THE TEACHER'S PRESENTATION OF THE TARGET LANGUAGE SHOULD ADHERE TO THE BASICALLY LINGUISTIC PRINCIPLES OF TEACHING, IN ORDER, THE BASIC FORMS, GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES, STRUCTURES WHICH HAVE NO…

When teaching English as a second language to speakers of Punjabi, it is useful for the teacher to have some knowledge of the students' native language. This paper analyzes the differences in word order between English and Punjabi. The five basic sentence patterns in English are contrasted with the equivalent sentence patterns in Punjabi.…

Developmental data from the acquisition of English by a German child, aged 5, are analyzed with a view to identifying structural conditions that give rise to interference, and to determine which L2 structures are affected and which structures govern developmental changes. Word order in German and English sentences ahve reflexes in different…

The internalized grammar of the bilingual is different from that of a monolingual. The bilingual has, in addition to the entries that are proper to each of the two languages he speaks, certain union entries. These are extensive in the case of the Spanish/English bilingual since there are many items in the two languages that manifest systematic…

This study was conducted to find and collocate the semantically equivalent form patterns of the English and Hungarian relation-marking systems by contrasting the use of the individual relational morphemes. The ultimate aim of the study is to determine interlingual congruences and contrasts for possible use in language teaching. The investigation…

Effective teaching of a foreign language to people who already have a command of their mother tongue requires surveying the main elements of the second language to determine differences from the first language. Phonological, lexical, and grammatical systems and cultural differences are considered. (SW)

A study investigated the frequent choice of the term "always" instead of the more appropriate term "often" in the essay writing of native Chinese-speaking learners of English as a Second Language (ESL), focusing on how problematic usage of "always" can adversely affect perceptions of the student's competence in…

Part of a 20-year Yugoslav Serbocroatian-English Contrastive Project, this study is intended to make students, teachers, textbook writers, and scholars aware of elements in the system of English modals that might cause difficulties to the native Serbocroatian-speaking learner of English. An eclectic method of contrastive analysis consisting of…