LANGUAGES SHOW CHARACTERISTIC DIFFERENCES IN THE WAY IN WHICH THEY ORGANIZE OBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE AND THESE DIFFERENCES ARE REFLECTED IN THE FORMAL AND SEMANTIC PATTERNING OF EACH LANGUAGE. A CONTRASTIVE APPROACH TO LANGUAGE LEARNING WHICH PAYS PARTICULAR ATTENTION TO POINTS OF FORMAL AND FUNCTIONAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ELEMENTS OF THE NATIVE…

Translation may be compared to a cable composed of many simultaneous strands of transfer. In translation, there is replacement which involves general hierarchical organization, grammatical constructions and constituents, mapping of deep onto surface structures, classes, ordering, lexicon, phonology, concordance, points of ambiguity, and…

Demonstrates the value of proverbs in developing the cross-linguistic understanding of professionals involved in intercultural situations. It is proposed that proverbs can provide insight into the symbol systems of English, Malay, and Arab cultures. (17 references) (Author/CK)

A discussion of communicative interaction focuses on the knowledge needed to achieve politeness in different languages, especially how that body of knowledge differs across languages and can be taught in foreign language instruction. It is noted that oral communication must accommodate the existing social order by use of appropriate registers.…

Questions the effectiveness of contrastive linguistics in measuring the difference between two languages and therefore in predicting the ease or difficulty of acquisition from one to the other. The simplicity of a language is not objectively quantifiable since it is measured as relative to other languages. (Text is in French.) (TL)

This article deals with the role in the preparation of foreign language teaching materials of error analysis and of the selection and ordering of linguistic features to be learned. The value for language teaching of contrastive analysis at the morphosyntactic and phonological levels is discussed. (CLK)

This article attempts, through a study on the acoustic and the perceptual level of the contrast between two Dutch vocalic phonemes, to present a rigorous methodology for contrastive phonetics to be used by language teachers. (Text is in French.) (AM)

The author discusses claims that linguistics can solve the problems of language teaching. Linguistics is either a theory of language or a description of a particular language, and both vary greatly from investigator to investigator, both as to scope and substance. Linguistic "analysis is the business of the linguist" but it is not essential to the…

Suggestions are made on the inclusion of historical linguistics in beginning or intermediate German classes in an attempt to show why the prospective teacher ought to have a knowledge of the history of the language. Appropriate levels are cited for the instructional suggestions given. (AF)

The formulas presented in this paper provide the means for showing the ease with which scientific information can be passed from one language into another. The formulas are based on several factors. The linguistic barrier can be measured to illustrate the relative degree of difference between two languages based on a comparison of vocabulary,…

The different ways of expressing a nuclear phrase from one language in another language are examined with reference to Finnish, Swedish, and French. Two specific methods of representing the root phrase in surface structure are examined in some detail. (MSE)