Chapter 4

CW4.1 CA in action: personal pronouns in English and Polish

Here is an example of part of an English–Polish contrastive analysis, abridged from Krzeszowski (1990: 41–3). Krzeszowski notes first that the English system of personal pronouns includes the following items (the subject pronouns):

 

Singular

Plural

1st person

I

we

2nd person

you

you

3rd person

he/she/it

they

The equivalent Polish system is:

 

Singular

Plural

1st person

ja

my

2nd person

ty

wy

3rd person

on/ona/ono

oni/one

In some ways, these two systems are identical. For example, both distinguish singular from plural, and both differentiate first-, second- and third-person pronouns. Notice also that for the third-person singular both English and Polish distinguish masculine, feminine and neuter pronouns. We might expect a Polish learner of English to receive positive transfer as regards these aspects, experiencing no problems with them when learning English.

But, Krzeszowski notes, there are also important differences. One of these relates to the second-person singular and plural forms. Many languages, like French with its tu and vous and German with its du and Sie, have a second-person singular pronoun which is used between friends and a more formal plural form for use with colleagues or strangers. Polish ty and wy are used in this way. But English pronouns do not mark this distinction. Once upon a time it did – in Shakespeare’s age for example – with the pronoun thou being the singular, familiar form. But this form has now dropped out of common usage.

Another difference may surprise you. It is to do with the third-person plural forms in Polish, oni and one. The distinction here is between what is called virile and non-virile. The virile form oni refers to groups of people in which there is at least one male person, while non-virile one is used for all other plural nouns.

This is only part of the picture. An added complication is that although both languages have masculine, feminine and neuter third-person singular forms, these work in quite different ways. In English, the gender of whatever is referred to is important: he is usually used for nouns that refer to male people or creatures, she is used for females, and it for other nouns. In Polish, the gender of nouns is grammatical. This means that (again, as in French and German) nouns are masculine, feminine or neuter, without regard to whether they refer to males, females or other. So very many inanimate objects will be masculine or feminine – in French the station is, for example, feminine: la gare. Krzeszowski illustrates this difference between Polish and English by means of the following sentences:

  1. Zgubilem swój stary portfel. On byl juz dosc zniszczony.
  2. I lost my old wallet. It was already rather worn out.

In Polish, the noun for wallet (portfel) is masculine, hence the pronoun is on (meaning, literally, he). In English, we use the pronoun it because a wallet is an inanimate object.

This last difference well illustrates how contrastive analysis can be used to predict learner errors. Krzeszowski (1990: 43) notes that Polish learners of English do in fact experience negative transfer here, often using he instead of it in sentences like (2) above.

CW4.2 Transfer: when and where?

  1. Taylor (1975) reports on a study involving 20 native-Spanish-speaking students learning English as a foreign language. Ten were elementary students and ten intermediate. The learners heard 80 sentences in Spanish and had to write translations in English. The errors they made were then analysed to see (among other things) which errors could be attributed to transfer. It was found that the elementary students made many more transfer errors than the intermediate group.
  2. Think of an example of someone you know who uses your native language as an FL. Focus on their pronunciation. What makes their accent sound ‘foreign’? Identify as many foreign characteristics as you can, including intonation and stress, perhaps. If you know anything about their native language, can you say what aspects of that language they are transferring into their foreign accent?

CW4.3 No mices? Then the cats are useless

Here are two sentences from the ‘Cats’ essay you saw in Box 2.2. Concentrate on the words in bold:

  1. Specially in cities, there is no problem of rates and mices.
  2. The cats are useless [the essay’s title]

It is almost certain that mices in (1) is an intralingual error. What exactly is happening here? Describe as precisely as you can how you think this error comes about.

Without knowing something about the writer’s L1, we cannot say whether the cats in (2) is an interlingual or intralingual error. For the sake of argument, imagine that it is intralingual and that the writer intended to say Cats are useless. What is the difference in meaning between The cats are useless and Cats are useless? Now imagine that you have to explain to the writer what he has done wrong and what he should have written. What would you say? 

Gluttons for punishment might also consider the essay’s first phrase, which is correct:

  1. The cat is useless …

Explain why the cats in (2) is wrong but the cat in (3) is right.

Answers

Mice is an irregular plural form of mouse. The learner knows that the morpheme –s is associated with noun plurality and adds it to the word mice. So mices is ‘doubly plural’.

One use of the definite article the is to refer back to something already mentioned. So the cats are useless may be used to refer to specific cats that have probably already been mentioned by the speaker. For example: Mary’s got three dogs and two cats. The dogs are very helpful to her. But the cats are useless. One use of the plural form, without any article, is to express a generalization. Cats are useless, without the definite article, would refer to cats in general. Another way of expressing the same idea is by use of the definite article and a singular noun. So the learner’s the cat is useless is correct. Another example of these two ways of expressing a generalization might be horses are beautiful animals and the horse is a beautiful animal.

CW4.4 Yes, but what does it mean in practice?

The penultimate paragraph of section 4.4 has implications which could potentially be challenging to conventional notions about language teaching. Here are two of them:

  1. The question is asked: ‘Is there any point in having an external syllabus if learners have their own internal one?’ Imagine that you answer this question by saying, ‘No, there isn’t. Let’s get rid of external syllabuses.’ Yes, but what does this mean in practice? What might language teaching not based on any external syllabus ‘look like’? Note that there may be more than one possible answer to this last question.
  2. The suggestion is made: ‘Perhaps a good teacher should make the FL classroom as much like the L1 environment as possible.’ Yes, but what does that mean in practice? A teacher will never be able to make their language classroom resemble the L1 environment in all respects. But is there anything they can do to move in this direction? What?

Both these issues will be raised in later chapters: the first in 11.2.3, and the second at various points, particularly in Chapter 9.