A bridge too far? the relationship between students’ perceptions of transfer of learning and instructional strategies in an academic literacy program in Thailand.

Abstract

Transfer of learning has long been foremost goal of education; this goal is explicit in English for Academic Purpose (EAP) and academic literacy courses that, by their nature, aim to support learning by providing students with language and literacy skill and knowledge that may be transferred to the disciplines. Perceivably, the south- after transfer of learning often fails to occur; cognitive- based theorists believe that this is because educators frequently neglect to attend explicitly to metacognitive strategies and method that promote transfer, expecting it rather, to occur spontaneously. Amongst prominent advocates of explicit strategies to address transfer of learning. Perkins and Solomon (1989) promote “hugging” and “bridging” strategies to address, respectively, “low-road” and “high-road” transfer, with the practical implementation of these strategies having been articulated by Forgarty, Perkins and Barell(1992) and customized to English Language Teaching (ELT) and, by implication, to EAP, by James(2006) This study adopts the hugging-bridging framework in an effort to understand their elation between instructors‟ classroom methods and the transfer of learning from an EAP-based academic literacy course to the disciplines in an international undergraduate programme in a university in Thailand.