A CONTRASTIVE APPROACH IN FOREIGN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING: A SCHEMA FOR TEACHING ADJECTIVES IN FOREIGN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING WITH RESPECT TO AGE

The importance of using the mother tongue in teaching a foreign language has not always been the same. While certain methods, such as the direct method or the audio-visual method, rejected the use of the mother tongue, others, for example Community Language Learning (CLL), gradually included the use of the mother tongue in the process of learning/teaching a foreign language. Contrastive analysis introduces a systematic study of the influence of the mother tongue in the process of learning/teaching a foreign language. This article discusses the use of the mother tongue in the process of learning/teaching a foreign language while using contrastive-oriented instruction. This implies the use of positive transfer from the mother tongue and the reduction of negative transfer using appropriate teaching techniques. The first part of this paper looks at the importance of the use of the mother tongue in learning/teaching a foreign language. In addition, it deals with the contrastive analysis of the lexical category of adjectives in the English and Croatian language with respect to the anticipated difficulties of language interference. The second part of the paper shows a schema for teaching adjectives in foreign English language learning/teaching designed according to the age level, from elementary to advanced level.