Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education: What We Know
Research on Knowledge Transfer within Cognitive Psychology
Research on knowledge transfer has shown that for knowledge to transfer successfully, the practice tasks (i.e. what is done in the university setting) have to be as similar as possible to the target tasks (i.e. what L2 teachers do in schools) at both the surface level and at a deeper level. (Bassok, 1990; Bassok & Holyoak, 1989; Catrombone, 1995; Holyoak & Koh, 1987; Lockhart, Lamon & Gick, 1988; Michael, Klee, Brasford & Warren, 1993; Singley & Anderson, 1989). “Even if something is learned...for transfer to occur, this knowledge must be encoded in such a way that it can be used in the target domain” (Lesgold, Rubinson, Feltovich, Glaser, Klopfer, & Wang, 1988: 302). It has also been found that that novices are much more dependent on surface similarity than those with more experience in a domain (Novick, 1988), meaning it may be especially important for novice teachers to have educational experiences in their teacher education programs which are clearly similar to the experiences they will have as teachers. (See Renkl & Atkinson, 2003, and Kalyuga, Ayres, Chandler & Sweller, 2003, for more information on the different cognitive needs of learners at different stages of expertise.)
Furthermore, when there is similarity between practice and transfer activities, there is less variability of knowledge transfer among the learners, making it a more equal opportunity learning experience than contexts where there is less similarity (Ackerman, 1988).
