Although critical of some of the claims made for contrastive analysis in the past, this article treats contrastive analysis as a useful pursuit which can contribute to language learning. (FB)

Discusses variation in interlanguage and suggests two hypotheses to explain such variation as multiple internal representations of a form and processing errors. Suggests that second language learners can initially represent new forms as prototype schemas, and that such non-discrete representations are a third source of variation in interlanguage.…