Set 1: Cross linguistic influence and learner language
Psychological principles of SLA form the foundation stones for building a comprehensible understanding of the acquisition of the linguistic system. The studies was centered on the contrasts between the native lang and the target lang (contrastive analysis) and the effect of the native on the target lang (cross linguistic influence).
1-The contrastive analysis Hypothesis It’s the study of two languages in contrast. Based on the behavioristic and structuralism approaches, it claimed that the principal barrier to SLA is the interference of the FL system with the SL system, and that a scientific, structural analysis of both lang in question would shield a taxonomy of linguistic contrasts between them which in turn would enable the linguist to predict the difficulties a learner could encounter. This would enable the linguist to accurately describe the two langs in question, and to match those two descriptions against each other to determine valid contrasts between them. Behaviorism contributed to the notion that human behavior is the sum of its smallest parts and components, and therefore that lang learning could be described as the acquisitions of all of those discrete units. Moreover, human learning theories highlighted interfering elements of learning, concluding that where no interference could be predicted, no difficulty would be experienced since one could transfer positively all other items in a lang. (SL basically involved the overcoming of the differences between the two lang systems-the native and target langs)
Some rather strong claims were made of the CAH by lang teaching experts and linguists. A well-known model was offered by stock-well, Bowen and martin who posited what they called a hierarchy of difficulty by which a teacher could make a prediction of the relative difficulty of a given aspect of the target lang. They suggested eight possible phonological degrees of difficulty