Language Magazine – Alexandra Guilamo
“Transfer is “the ability to directly apply one’s previous learning to a new setting or problem” (Schwartz and Bransford, 1998, p. 68). We see everyday examples of transfer when we learn what a stop sign is and recognize it in another country where we can’t actually read the word stop itself. We see transfer in the way we still know what a chair is regardless of the material used to make it. Yet, for emergent bilinguals and dual language (DL) students developing biliteracy, transfer serves a more important role. In fact, transfer is an indispensable part of the formula for developing biliteracy: oracy x transfer x linguistic comprehension x word recognition = biliteracy (or O x T x C x D = R2) (Guilamo, 2021).” (more)