| Contrastive Analysis (CA) is a method to predict learners'potential difficulties and problems by comparing the mother tongue and the target language. And it is widely accepted that CA can provide inspirational guidelines for language teaching and learning on the phonological and the grammatical level. But studies of its validity on the vocabulary level are rather few. This essay, based on theories concerning CA, tries to describe an experiment on contrastive instructions of lexical features in college English classes, in an attempt to argue that using some of the results of CA for vocabulary instructions on the English class, that is, explicitly pointing out the differences between the English words and their Chinese versions will help learners to acquire vocabulary more effectively, both in quantity and in quality. With 60 college freshmen of non-English majors as subjects, who are divided into experimental group and control group, receiving different treatments within 16 weeks, the data is collected and analyzed by statistical computing formula with the help of Excel and further confirmed by SPSS 12.0. It turns out there's no significant difference between the two groups. However, subjects in experimental group, who received instructions in different lexical features between English and Chinese, did demonstrate better understanding of the target words than those in control group by making up more comprehensible and context-sensitive sentences. Given that the sample is too small and the time for instruction is not sufficient to make a noticeable difference, long-term experiments with larger sample can be carried out to further explore the efficiency of applying CA to vocabulary instructions.
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