| 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. This thesis, based on theories concerning CA, tries to describe an experiment on contrastive instructions of syntactic features in college English classes, in an attempt to examine whether using some of the results of CA for translation instructions by explicitly pointing out the differences between the English sentences and their Chinese versions will help learners to acquire translation proficiency more effectively. With 98 college juniors of non-English majors as subjects, who are divided into experimental group and control group, receiving different treatments within 10 weeks, the data is collected and analyzed with the help of Excel and SPSS 13.0. It turns out there is no significant difference between the two groups. However, subjects in the experimental group, who received instructions in different syntax features between English and Chinese, did demonstrate better understanding of the target language than those in the control group by producing more comprehensible and contextually suitable 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 translation instructions.
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