What is Transfer and Why is it Important?

Transfer refers to the ways in which a person's knowledge of one language can affect his or her learning, knowledge and use of another language (cf. Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008: 1). This term is often used interchangeably with crosslinguistic influence – or CLI – and this is a convention that will be followed throughout this chapter and the entire book. Although some scholars have implied that the term transfer as it relates to language learning originated in the behaviorist paradigm in the early 1900s (e.g. Gass, 2013: 79–85), the truth is that transfer and its translation equivalents in other languages were already being used to refer to CLI well before this time and in a way that was completely independent of behaviorism (see Odlin & Yu, 2016: 5–6). Even so, some researchers are unhappy with the term transfer because they feel it implies that something is literally being moved from one place to another (e.g. Corder, 1983: 92). Although most researchers today do not view CLI as involving the literal transfer of forms, structures, meanings or functions from one part of a language learner's brain to another, the original meaning of the Latin term transferre (trans- = 'across', ferre = 'to carry') is still relevant to many cases of CLI, where language learners appear to carry over certain patterns of language use from one language into their use of another language (cf. Odlin & Yu, 2016: 3–4). Other types of CLI – such as the enhanced rate of learning a similar language – do not reflect this common meaning of transfer, but even in these cases it can be preferable to use transfer rather than crosslinguistic influence for reasons of convenience. It is certainly less cumbersome to say lexical transfer, for example, than it is to say lexical crosslinguistic influence, and this should not be a problem as long as researchers clearly define the phenomenon they are investigating.