The Fourth Element: Integrating Transfer Talk Into Teaching For Transfer

In Writing Studies, one of the most debated topics is whether or not we can teach students to engage in writing transfer. In order to help students, we must engage them in learning about transfer as often as possible, especially in their first-year writing (FYW) courses, with teaching- for-transfer-specific pedagogies, like the widely known Teaching for Transfer (TFT) (Yancey et al. 2014). However, there are some elements that have yet to be fully developed in their research, like the role of collaborative learning. With this thesis, I argue for the integration of a new concept, Transfer Talk (TT) (Nowacek et al. 2019), into the TFT curriculum as the fourth element. Scholars who use TT strategies suggest that students should collaborate with their peers to consider their prior writing knowledge and build a shared understanding of what writing knowledge looks like. By integrating TT into the TFT curriculum as the fourth element, we will provide students with more opportunities to learn about transfer in the hopes that they will be more successful when transferring writing knowledge in future composing situations, both in and out of school.

Teaching for Transfer to First-Year L2 Writers

Previous studies have identified that genres and genre knowledge are not only pivotal for the development of writing expertise but also for facilitating writing-related transfer. However, little research concerns issues of teaching genres for writing transfer to first-year English as a second language (L2) writers at universities in the US. This article attempts to develop a genre-based pedagogic framework for L2 transfer teaching, aiming to help first-year L2 students address linguistic, rhetorical, and genre-bound challenges they confront and improve their writing expertise, as well as develop their ability of writing transfer across disciplines. The goals of this article are dual: (a) to address an existing gap in the literature and research on transfer, and (b) provide academic writing instructions for teaching first-year L2 writers at universities in the United States.