Hungarian-English Linguistic Contrasts. A practical approach

Abstract

The usefulness of Contrastive Linguistics in language teaching is debatable, yet there is no doubt that linguistic contrasts play a role in language learning, particularly at the advanced level. For trainee teachers it is important to be aware of L1–L2 contrasts. This coursebook aims to acquaint students of English Studies with those contrastive linguistic concepts that have retained their significance over the years, and to focus on those English-Hungarian contrasts that have actually been found to impact learning. Short summaries of the most important principles and concepts proposed by classical Contrastive Analysis are followed by numerous exercises. The book is not a contrastive grammar: it takes a look at Hungarian–English contrasts at several linguistic levels, lexical, phraseological, textual and pragmatic, focusing on those that have been found to cause difficulty and/or error in teaching and translating practice. A key is provided to most exercises.