The Unpredictability of Contrastive Analysis

The hypothesis that contrastive analysis can serve to predict levels of difficulty that non‐native speakers will have in learning English syntactic patterns is examined. Two tests of English syntax were administered to nearly 2500 Japanese students. The test results are compared to predictions of the relative difficulty of the test items that were derived from four different contrastive analyses. The comparison indicates that the contrastive analyses are inadequate predictors of subject performance. Certain properties of subject performance are discussed, especially the role that the complexity of English constructions may play in determining Japanese difficulty on the tests.