Overview:

In simple terms, the aim in teaching a language is to open up its resources to the learner so that he or she may find the right words and sentences to convey the meaning intended. The teaching of languages is by no means a recent or novel activity and there has always been a constant search for effective ways of optimizing learning in various parts of the world. However, in spite of the seminal work of scholars like Henry Sweet, Otto Jespersen, Harold Palmer, Michael West and others, no accepted and well articulated theory of language teaching has emerged because a number of complex factors such as the goals of teaching aptitude, ability and motivation of learners, teachers' competence, effective methods and materials, policy matters, and language planning are involved in language teaching.

Objectives and Goals: The goals of teaching language must be defined within the social-cultural contexts in which teaching and learning are carried out.

(a) The goals of teaching the mother tongue or the first language are different from those of teaching a foreign language or a second language. In a sense, the first language is not taught, but caught. This means that the first language is learnt by the child naturally; he picks it up from the speakers around him. Any normal child must learn how to listen understand and speak the language used in his or her social environment. Learning the first language is like one of the basic instincts which cannot be suppressed; learning the first language depends on the growth and maturity of the child and exposure to the linguistic environment. Linguists say that the innate language learning ability of the human mind, when it comes into contact with the socio-linguistic environment, enables the child to learn the language by constructing his own grammar of the language in a natural way. Listening and speaking the first language are natural processes but not reading and writing. When the child goes to school, he or she must be taught how to read and write. The goals of teaching the first language may be:

(i) teaching how to read and write;
(ii) teaching the standard language (the child may have learnt a dialect used in his/her social environment), and its registral varieties;
(iii) teaching the literature of the first language and through it the culture and literary heritage of the language community.

(b) If, for example, French or German is being taught to a Bengali-speaking learner, the goal is limited; the learner is not going to use French or German for day-to-day communication in India; if he goes to France or Germany he has to use French or German in its own cultural context. So the literary, cultural and integrative purposes predominate in learning a foreign language and the instrumental or communicative function is rather limited and minimized.

(c) In teaching a second language, for example English, to a Tamil speaker, the goal is instrumental or communicative and the cultural and literary goals are minimized. In the social set up in India, the learner may have to use English or Hindi for purposes of communication (oral or written), in his day-to-day life in the office, in the market place, in the bank, in social functions, etc.

The difference between teaching English as a second language and Hindi as a second language to a Tamil learner will be the degree to which the languages are related. Hindi and Tamil, though they belong to Indo-Aryan and Dravidian respectively, share some aspects of the culture of the sub-continent; English, on the other hand, though and Indo-European language, does not share the culture of the sub-continent. That makes the learning of English more instrumental and more a tool for modernization than the learning of Hindi as a second language. Thus, the goal is more instrumental in learning a second language whereas it is more integrative in the case of a foreign language though the two may be present in varying degrees in all language teaching/learning situations.

The Basic Assumptions in the Cognitive Approach:

(a) Language is not just behavior; it is rule-governed creativity. The use of language resembles writing a play more than performing in one.
(b) Any behavior is controlled by cognitive processes involving understanding; skills are actions that are originally voluntary and which later become automatic.
(c) Practice without understanding the underlying principles will be meaningless and mere repetition tends to weaken under-standing.
(d) To teach is to select and to create appropriate conditions for learning; teaching is not conditioning.

To learn is to understand valid generalizations, discriminations, and relationships. Learning of any sort is largely a matter of drawing out what is innate in the mind; it is a matter of growth and maturation of relatively fixed capacities, under appropriate external conditions.

(e) Sentence types and parts of sentences must be taught in a related way.
(f) Languages do differ, but they also have a great deal in common. Learning a second language is always, in some measure, repeating an old experience though some people like Krashen [3] feel that native language is acquired and the second language is learnt.

Contrastive Linguistics and Error Analysis: In learning the first language the learner's mind tries to understand only one linguistic system and he is exposed to the first language all the time. When he starts learning a second language, there is a clash between the system of the first language and that of the second. When one language system becomes more or less a habit, the learning of a second language becomes rather difficult. The mistakes made in the second language are often due to:

(i) the gravitational pull of the first language/mother tongue;
(ii) internal analogy and overgeneralization (e. g., childrens, furnitures, teached, bringed, a milk, etc., are created on the basis of other items like boys, tables, walked, worked, a man, etc.);
(iii) pronunciation according to spelling;
(iv) bad teaching;
(v) exposure to the non-standard variety used outside the classroom;
(vi) the attitudes of community, those in power, the policy of the government and such other factors;
(vii) failure to understand the nature of the second language;
(viii) lack of adequate vocabulary; and
(ix) the cultural gap between the two systems.

The comparison of two or more linguistic systems as they exist today (i. e., a synchronic comparison) is known as contrastive linguistics. The diachronic comparison of two or more linguistic systems with a view to classifying languages into families and finding out or reconstructing a parent language from which related languages have developed, is known as comparative or historical linguistics. Contrastive linguistics is only a predictive technique. This means that by looking at the structure of two or more linguistic systems we can predict the difficulties the learner is likely to encounter; it does not mean that for all the mistakes a learner makes in the second language, the first language habits alone are responsible. Contrastive linguistics explores both the dissimilarities and similarities of the linguistic systems compared. The similarities can be properly exploited.

Contrastive studies are undertaken not necessarily for language teaching purposes alone; contrastive studies may be useful in discovering language universals, studying problems in translation, studying language types, etc. The synchronic comparison of languages may be undertaken at any or all levels phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, cultural, etc. If the languages are compared, it is called inter-lingual (i. e., contrastive) comparison; if two varieties of the same language are compared, it is intra-lingual comparison. Any linguistic model-traditional, structural, transformational, etc.-can be used for comparing languages.

For example, if we use the transformational framework, we may compare the Ps rules and the transformational processes in the two linguistic systems compared. The advances in linguistics and the new insights have made it possible for us to be more methodical in our comparison on languages.

Contrastive linguistics is not a teaching technique. It can only help the teacher or the materials writer to plan and grade teaching materials. Even native speakers make mistakes; they may be just slips; The mistakes in the case of a native speaker do not become part of his linguistic habit. There may be lapses, slips, stylistic oddities in his speech or writing.

Conclusion: Second language learners commit errors; mistakes that get fossilized are errors. As Pit Corder points out in Introducing Applied Linguistics(1973),

learning a second language [1]

can be so regarded in exactly the same way that an infant learning his mother tongue can be counted to posses a language of his own at each successive stage of his learning career. A learner's so-called errors are systematic, and it is precisely this regularity which shows that the learner is following a set of rules. These rules are not those of the target language but a transitional form of language similar in many respects to the target language, but also similar to his mother tongue, or indeed any other language he may already command
(p. 149).

Some applied linguists like Selinker call the transitional form inter-language and some call it the intermediary language. Some linguists say that the first language is caught and a second language is taught; the first language is acquired and a second language is learnt. There are others who argue that the processes of learning the first or the second language are the same.

Syllabus makers can make use of the descriptions of languages and contrastive studies in grading the items to be taught from known to unknown, similar to dissimilar, general rules to exceptions, and from universals to language-specific items. Not all the rules or habits of the first language will result in errors and it is the job of contrastive analysis to determine how far this is the case and how much of the first language that is considered transferable facilitates the learning of the second; Error analysis too has both practical and theoretical uses.

The learner, through his errors, provides examples of negative learning. The applied linguist can understand through the negative instances (i. e., errors) what is going on when people learn languages. Errors provide feedback and tell the teachers about the effectiveness of the teaching materials and the teaching techniques.

Notes & References:
1. Corder, Pit. S. (1973), Introducing Applied Linguistics, Penguin
2. Widdowson, Henry, G. (1979), Explorations in Linguistics, Oxford.
3. Krashen, S. D. (1981), Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning, Pergamon
4. Mackey, W. F. (1965), Language Teaching Analysis, Longmans.
5. S. K. Verma& N. Krishnaswamy, (1989,2000),Modern Linguistics- An Introduction, Oxford University Press
6. Bright, J. A. and McGregor, G. P. (1970), Teaching English as a Second Language, ELBS and Longman