Up until the 1960s and early 1970s the prevailing account of the process of second language acquisition relied on the notion of transfer and contrastive analysis.[…] Contrastive analysis was developed as a means of comparing two languages in order to pinpoint the areas of difference and similarity. Such analyses in conjunction with so-called error analysis […] were then used to predict and/or account for the problems and errors likely to result in the learning of a particular language by a learner with a given language background.
- Romaine (1988), a pag.206