FOSTERING TRANSFER IN THE FIELD OF GRAMMAR AS A WAY OF DEVELOPING OTHER LANGUAGE COMPETENCES

Revista del Centro de Investigación de Lingüística y de Didáctica de la Lengua Inglesa (CILDLI) del Profesorado de Inglés del Instituto de Formación Docente ´Nuestra Señora del Sagrado Corazón´

Instituto de Formación Docente ´Nuestra Señora del Sagrado Corazón´

Lugar: Córdoba Capital; Año: 2014; p. 79 - 91

Based on our experience in teaching EFL at tertiary and university level, we can affirm that one of the commonest problems when teaching the language is the fact that students seem not to transfer what they have learnt in the grammar class to solve the linguistic problems they are confronted with in other subjects. On the other hand, teachers seem not to support the students´ abilities to transfer what they have learnt in the classs as to help them actively put knowledge into practice in new and challenging linguistic settings. Thus, in this paper we will focus on the need to create a new learning environment where students are trained to transfer what they have learnt in the grammar course into new learning situations. In other words, we believe that students need to be taught how to transfer their knowledge ? that is, they need to understand how a particular grammatical structure presented and practised in the grammar class may or should be relevant to a wide variety of linguistic situations and/or skills developed in other subjects.