Description
Learners’ successful application of their learning to later practical situations is called transfer of learning. Considering transfer of learning as one of the fundamental goals in education, educational psychologists started to examine what triggers this phenomenon more than a century ago. The central theory at that time was called the identical element theory, which claims that transfer is likely between problems including similar elements. On the other hand, it was largely believed that learners would fail to transfer their useful knowledge when they face dissimilar problems. Since the identical element theory, many researchers have examined it and supported its basic claim, while others have developed and expanded the theory, taking broader perspectives to include more transfer factors around the similarity principle. As a result, when transfer is discussed in recent literature, many researchers refer to the transfer-appropriate processing theory instead, which essentially makes similar claims to the identical element theory but putting more emphasis on learners’ processing rather than problems seen in isolation and detached from learners. Therefore, it is now very difficult to understand transfer of learning from the singular lens of similarity. In order to make the discussion of transfer more applicable to second language education, this presentation tries to clarify three important types of similarity with the help of a diagram containing three elements: contents, contexts, and cognition. The presentation discusses how these three types of similarity foster learners’ transfer, how they interact with each other, and how they might contribute to second language education.
