Critics of CA

During the period of 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s contrastive analysis was important for language teachers, learners, and syllabus designers. Later, during the last decades, it has faced some criticisms on its theoretical foundation and methodological practice. One of these criticisms is that contrastive analysis can predict only some of the learning problems. These problems are related to interference. According to Abbas (1995) contrastive analysis basic weakness lies in its overwhelming emphasis on one type of errors, i.e. interference. Actually, the source of errors cannot be limited to interference; there are many errors that are caused by overgeneralization, such as goed, and some are not of a linguistics origin but of a psychological one. In the same way, since all errors are seen as caused by interference, any solution will be in the form of the mother tongue interference. Another criticism on CA is that it can predict the problems faced by second language learners but it cannot predict the strategies the learners can employ to overcome these problems. These strategies are needed by the learner in the learning process and help to reduce errors. . Furthermore, contrastive analysis was criticized because, according to contrastive analysis, the comparison of the two languages is of interest only if errors are regular and systematic. Actually, errors do not have to be always systematic in the sense that the learner may not produce the same error in different contexts, and thus we cannot give an appropriate explanation of these errors. Also, contrastive analysis was criticized because of the over prediction of errors. Actually, there are many errors that contrastive analysis predicts do not appear in the language of second language learners; that is contrastive analysis shows some errors that are not confirmed by the actual performance of l2 learners.

In addition, another criticism on contrastive analysis is that the learner is presented not with the whole system of the target language but only with its parts and fragments (rivers 1970). In other words, it concentrates on some elements of the target language and neglects some others, and thus the learner will acquire some elements of l2 instead of learning the whole system. For example, the teacher may devote a lot of time practicing a structure of the target language for the sole reason that it does not appear in the learner's l1 when it will be more useful to the learner to learn another structure which has a higher frequency in the foreign language (Fisiak 1981) A further criticism is that foreign language teachers think that contrastive analysis is not of any benefit to l2 teaching. They think that they themselves can predict the difficulties the learners face. Regarding this point, some researchers think that CA only helpful when the teacher has no knowledge of the learner's mother tongue and therefore they can use CA comparison as a reference. Actually another aspect which caused the weakness of contrastive analysis is that it can be used in homogeneous classes rather than heterogeneous ones. That is because in homogeneous classes students are all of the same mother tongue and almost have the same ease and difficulty since they all share a similar background Generally, contrastive analysis was also criticized because adequate knowledge of the languages to be contrasted may not be possessed by many researchers. in other words, when making a comparison between two languages this require knowledge of the languages to be compared in order to produce a scientific reliable description, this knowledge might not be possessed by many researchers .