Abstract
In current college-level English curriculum design, the separation of skills courses from content courses has operated on the implicit assumption that knowledge or skills taught in language courses can be applied outside these classes—that they will transfer to new situations even if those situations differ greatly from the original learning situation. This assumption of more general transfer nonetheless has not yet been validated in psychological studies. Research on transfer, furthermore, has been largely restricted to task similarity and learner cognition and has given little attention to affective factors. This study, thus, aimed to examine (1) the assumption behind current English curriculum design, more general transfer; (2) the composition transfer effects; and (3) the association between Transfer Effects and Motivation Towards Learning English. In this study, twelve Taiwanese freshman English majors who were simultaneously enrolled in a writing course and an unrelated content course were examined. Transfer Effects were operationalized in terms of mean error rates obtained from a comparison of the first writing in the composition class with the one writing in the content course, produced at the end of the term. Writing improvement in the composition class was taken as a precondition for transfer. The target errors were of four kinds: Sentence Break, Verb Tense, Grammatical Cohesion, and Coherence. The error data were correlated with Motivation data obtained from a 24-item Likert scale on Motivation (including the three subscales Attitudes Towards Learning English, Desire to Learn English, and Motivational Intensity) to investigate how Transfer Effect was related to Motivation. Wilcoxon Matched-Pairs Signed-Ranks Tests showed positive transfer in Sentence Break. Individual analyses of those learners who had reduced their errors in the writing course revealed positive, zero, and negative transfer for Sentence Break, Verb Tense, and Grammatical Cohesion respectively. Coherence was excluded because of problems involving writing length. In addition, Motivation was negatively related to Transfer Effects in Sentence Break and Verb Tense. For Sentence Break, Attitudes Towards Learning English and Desire to Learn English displayed a closer negative relation to transfer than did Motivational Intensity, but for Verb Tense, the three sub-variables displayed equally negative correlations. As to Grammatical Cohesion, the correlations were too weak to indicate a relation between Motivation and Transfer Effects. The significant positive transfer in Sentence Break might primarily be due to the limited instruction/correction, adequate amount of practice, accrued general exposure to the L2, the high degree of task similarity, and the simplicity of the skill itself. In general, the skill is simple enough to be automated within a semester and so it could be accurately used even without Perceived Task Similarity. For Verb Tense and Grammatical Cohesion, small gains in the writing class might have been accompanied by Transfer Effects in an uninteresting sense, possibly resulting from the low degree of initial learning (pseudolearning), insufficient writing practice, difficult content tasks, language difficulty, and inadequate attention and time allocated to forms in writing. The learners still had to perceive task similarity in order for transfer to occur. For all the error types, final content grades were unrelated to Transfer Effects, despite the fact that increased expertise in the content area (measured by grades in this case) is generally believed to facilitate transfer because it frees attentional resources for other tasks. This finding might be due to learners focusing their attention on language problems other than those studied here. The negative effects of Motivation on Learning/Transfer in Sentence Break and Verb Tense violated the previous claim that Motivation determines language learning or transfer. But negative relations were consistently obtained between Attitudes Towards Writing and Learning/Transfer Effects in the analysis of the follow-up survey. The results raise the possibility that there is a genuine negative relation between Motivation and Transfer/Learning and so motivate further investigation. The restricted positive transfer might suggest that general transfer (as assumed in the current curriculum design of English departments) did occur. But it might have been obtained more generally if a higher level of initial composition learning had occurred. Insomuch as this study was restricted by small sample size, sampling methods, and other confounding factors, the effectiveness of this curriculum design might need to be verified hereafter. For future research on transfer, this exploratory investigation has given valuable suggestions and established a preliminary foundation.