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Transfer and Translingualism
Rebecca Lorimer Leonard and Rebecca Nowacek
he happy coincidence of our collaboration belies an unhappy truth about
the divide between work done in the areas of transfer and translingualism.
Rebecca Nowacek began her dissertation thinking about interdisciplinarity
but shifted some years ago to understanding her work as focused on transfer
of learning among various disciplinary and co-curricular studies. Rebecca Lorimer
Leonard began her research tracing the movement of immigrants’ literacy practices
among languages and geographical locations, finding in the process how porous the
boundaries are of both language and location. It was only the serendipity of a mutual
friend suggesting that we three might form a panel on the implications of transfer
of learning in writing centers (which we all direct) that brought our work together.
Both of us, we are a bit ashamed to admit, were initially slow to see the rich connections between our work—but once we did, neither of us could see our own projects
in quite the same way again.
We are not alone in our earlier inability to see the connections between transfer
and translingualism, a situation exacerbated, perhaps even created, by overlooking
the multiple meanings redolent in both terms. In what follows, we start by identify-
T
Reb ecca Lo ri m e r Le o n ard has been an NCTE member since 2002 and is an assistant professor
in the Department of English at University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she teaches undergraduate
and graduate courses on literacy studies, language diversity, and research methods. She also currently
directs the UMass Amherst Writing Center. Professor Lorimer Leonard has published in Written Communication, College English, WPA: Writing Program Administration, and Research in the Teaching of English.
In 2014, she received the Promising Researcher Award from NCTE. Re b e cca S. N owa ce k joined
NCTE in 2000 and is associate professor of English at Marquette University, where she directs the Norman H. Ott Memorial Writing Center. Professor Nowacek’s research focuses on transfer of learning and
writing across the disciplines. Her publications include Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a
Rhetorical Act, Literacy Economy and Power, and Citizenship across the Curriculum; her work has also appeared
in College Composition and Communication, College English, and Research in the Teaching of English. Rebecca
was a Carnegie Scholar with the Carnegie Foundation’s CASTL program and the recipient of Marquette
University’s Robert and Mary Gettel Faculty Award for Teaching Excellence.
College English, Volume 78, Number 3, January 2016
Copyright © 2016 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.
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ing the confluences between definitions of these terms, then continue by reflecting
on the ways in which emerging translingual perspectives might inform, as well as be
informed by, studies of transfer of learning.
Over the last several years, questions about transfer of learning initially taken
up by scholars studying first-year writing have gathered attention throughout the
field of rhetoric and composition: conference sessions devoted to transfer have skyrocketed, the Elon Seminar on Critical Transitions facilitated multi-institutional
research projects as well as an international conference, and a special issue on transfer appeared in Composition Forum. In everyday usage, the term transfer suggests a
process of application, of carrying knowledge and skills from an earlier experience
and employing them, to greater or lesser effect, in a subsequent context. When colleagues, parents, and employers worry about transfer of learning, that anxiety most
often focuses on whether students are using what they have already learned (or at
least been exposed to) to succeed in a new context. Within transfer scholarship, a
more dynamic understanding of transfer has emerged, one that emphasizes the potential for disruption and transformation. The term transfer also has a terminological
history in applied linguistics, especially in second language acquisition and English
for academic purposes (see for example DePalma and Ringer; James, “Learning
Transfer”; James, “Motivation”; Leki and Carson). For some scholars, the term
transfer carries behaviorist notions that a known language can negatively “interfere”
with the acquisition of another. For these reasons, some scholars prefer using “crosslinguistic influence” over “transfer” to explain how knowledge of one language can
affect the knowledge and use of another (Jarvis and Pavlenko; Sharwood Smith and
Kellerman). That the word transfer resonates so differently is neither surprising nor
troubling—but it does suggest the value of bringing into dialogue the multiple ways
the term has been valued, interrogated, and even deromanticized.
Translingualism’s multiple meanings come from recent work within composition studies that reminds the field of the fluidity of language use in writing (Alvarez;
Canagarajah, Literacy; Horner et al.; Lu and Horner), as well as scholarship in adjacent fields that highlights the agentive and ideological qualities of writers’ language
repertoires (Creese and Blackledge; Garcia and Wei; Makoni and Pennycook). We
elaborate these layers of definition to illuminate the connections between transfer and
translingualism but also to add a note of caution: though transfer and translingualism
both index movement among contexts, practices, or meanings with their shared trans
prefix, neither suggests a neutral carrying over of knowledge from one context or
language to another. In fact, the definitions here offer a reminder that composing is
an activity carried out in language varieties that bring their sociopolitical histories
to any given writing context.
For example, etymologically, transfer invokes a process of “carrying across,” suggesting a simple movement from one location to another. However, research shows
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that transfer of writing abilities involves much more than the mere application of
writing skills and knowledge to a new situation; Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak, to
take one example, offer a typology of how writers employ prior knowledge, including assemblage, remix, and critical incidents. A translingual perspective similarly
emphasizes communicative practices as agentive negotiation, as in Canagarajah’s and
Young’s work on code-meshing (Canagarajah, “Place”; Young). Indeed, in both areas
of study, writing practices are viewed not as static possessions that can be carried and
applied, but as emergent and in-process activities sensitive to an immediate context.
Transfer and translingualism, then, share definitional aspects that make their
potential alignment clear, yet each could still benefit from considering the other’s
research questions, theoretical frames, and methodologies. More specifically, transfer
scholarship might be informed by a translingual approach to composition in two
main ways.
Because a translingual approach focuses on the ideological status of language in
writing—emphasizing that writing in standard English is never neutral, for example—
it foregrounds and complicates issues of power in communication. This reminds transfer scholars to also account for language ideologies in the writing skills, knowledge,
and contexts studied. For instance, a scholar studying the transfer of writing-related
knowledge from first-year composition (FYC) to writing in the disciplines might ask
how a more tolerant attitude toward language varieties in FYC might affect a writer’s
sense of options and actual choices in subsequent classes. This scholar might further
ask how the varieties used in these multiple settings endorse certain language beliefs
and values that are assessed by instructors in any given instance of transfer. Such
teacherly values and beliefs are not about the writing skill alone but also about the
language varieties and rhetorical strategies used to make that writing skill visible and
valuable to an instructor. While transfer studies in composition have devoted a great
deal of thought to double binds, dispositions, and the role of reflection, they have
not yet attended in sustained, systematic ways to language negotiation, despite the
fact that such choices and navigations are indeed being made, even among primarily
monolingual students and instructors. More intentional interplay between transfer
and translingualism is poised to open new directions of research.
But it’s not just that a translingual approach would promote more exploration
of the role of language in transfer, important as that contribution may be. More
fundamentally, translingualism might challenge some persistent assumptions about
how to recognize and evaluate transfer in ways that could profoundly influence the
work of instructors as well as researchers. Because a translingual approach treats
language difference as a locus of meaning rather than a problem, transfer researchers
might reorient their understanding of what has caused a transfer attempt to fail—and
what, in fact, constitutes failure. Translingualism asks what a language difference or
deviation does, how it functions “expressively, rhetorically, communicatively” and
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“for whom, under what conditions, and how” (Horner et al. 303–4). Both transfer
and translingualism acknowledge that writers do make mistakes and do not always
have complete control over communicative production. But under a translingual approach, language deviations in writing can be considered not always failure to transfer
standard writing knowledge, but instead a norm of language-in-practice, one of its
meaning-making functions. Sometimes what looks like a messy text—riddled with
errors, seeming to ignore the assignment—might be a textual manifestation of the
intellectually adventurous, rhetorically challenging work of negotiating the overlap
of knowledges, identities, and languages.
This stance toward linguistic diversity challenges dominant frameworks for
studying transfer. If difference serves as a source of meaning, then it is not always a
problem to be eliminated with more effective strategies for “teaching for transfer”
(an idea also suggested by Nowacek’s transfer matrix and similar to Bawarshi’s
claim in this issue that genre difference is not “deviation . . . but . . . the norm of all
genre performance” [244]). Quite understandably, most studies look for evidence
of transfer; it is their raison d’etre. Sometimes, though, they are forced to identify
instances of what are generally called zero and negative transfer. As instructors and
colleagues, we worry when students don’t seem to make use of what they’ve learned
from high school in college or from FYC in their other coursework; worse yet, we
are haunted by the possibility of prior learning negatively affecting or interfering
with subsequent coursework (much as research cited earlier investigated interference
on a target language to be acquired).
But a translingual approach—one emphasizing differences as a locus of meaning—might ask some critical questions of the search for evidence of transfer. Where,
for instance, does the evidence of transfer (or zero transfer, or negative transfer) lie?
In an instructor’s grade? In a writer’s retrospective account given to an interviewer
with an agenda that may seem more or less transparent to the writer? In analyses
of texts guided by the criteria set by instructors and/or researchers? None of these
sources of evidence of transfer are inherently flawed; but they are, a translingual
approach points out, inevitably limited, because these processes of data collection
and analysis tacitly assume that the goal is a visible application of knowledge from
Context A in Context B. A perspective that embraces the meaning-making nature
of differences and ostensible “deviations” might encourage transfer researchers to
attend more carefully to when ruptures exist, how they function, and for whom.
For instance, a translingual approach to zero and negative transfer might look
something like the work of Reiff and Bawarshi’s study of boundary crossers and
boundary guarders. This study begins to shift, subtly but significantly, the ways in
which researchers conceptualize “negative transfer.” Importantly, the construct of
boundary crossers and guarders directs attention back to the motives, resources, and
identities of the individual writers who are making (and sometimes resisting) these
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connections. A translingual approach to transfer might continue to alter the lens
of inquiry in this way, turning attention toward the racial, gendered, institutional,
economic, and class-based components of linguistic diversity: beyond recognition of
difference to the matrices of power that regulate that difference; beyond individual
writing subjects to relationships among subjects and the writing contexts they enter.
Moving in the reverse direction to consider how a translingual approach might
benefit from transfer research, we are inspired most by the methodological possibilities suggested by the transfer literature. Although the need for other types of
research (e.g., multi-institutional studies) has become increasingly clear, a review of
the transfer literature demonstrates the value of fine-grained, long-term, naturalistic studies of writing (Beaufort, Carroll, Herrington & Curtis, McCarthy, Roozen,
Sternglass, Wardle, Yancey et al.)—a value that might be productively taken up in
research on a translingual approach.
When we turn our attention to composition scholarship that adopts or promotes
a translingual perspective, we primarily find theoretical (Horner et al.; Horner,
Donahue, and NeCamp; Ray) or single-writer or single-classroom case studies
(Canagarajah, “Codemeshing”; Lu and Horner; Lueck). While foundational, much
of the theoretical work could benefit from the descriptive examples “that document
the efforts of students” (as called for by Gilyard in this issue) provided by methods
taken up in transfer. And while demonstrative, the single-writer or single-classroom
focus can inhibit a sense of relevance to broad classroom or institutional settings.
The longitudinal and cross-classroom methodologies often seen in transfer research
could make a translingual approach more immediately relevant to those who might
otherwise dismiss it as not applicable to their students or institution. Moving forward,
both transfer and translingualism could consider how the movement suggested by
their prefix blurs rather than reinforces boundaries writers are crossing. To do this,
research in both areas might need a more robust understanding of how writing moves
across both time (longitudinal) and space (cross-contextual).
Thus, these seemingly separate areas share much. Both transfer and translingualism are experiencing significant currency and burgeoning debates, with each
seeming to speak to contemporary puzzles encountered in our daily work. Both
have origins in but depart from long conversations in cognitive psychology, second
language writing, and integrative learning. Moving forward, perhaps both transfer
and translingualism might be best understood not as prescribed pedagogies or policies, but as terms with explanatory value: small theories that help open up changing
practices in our writing lives.
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