Facilitating Adaptive and Dynamic Learning Transfer Using Genre-based, Translingual, and Multimodal Pedagogies in L2 Composition Instruction

Ensuring that students can transfer the knowledge and skills they learn in L2 composition classes to future personal, academic, and professional contexts outside of the classroom is perhaps the most important goal of L2 college writing instruction. However, while research shows that pedagogies based in adaptive and dynamic learning transfer, defined as the repurposing or innovation of knowledge to negotiate new and unfamiliar writing contexts, are more successful in preparing students to transfer their knowledge to future contexts than pedagogies based in similarity learning transfer, defined as the matching of knowledge across comparable known contexts, many L2 college composition instructors still either only rely on similarity transfer techniques or assume that learning transfer will automatically take place without specific pedagogical interventions. This project examines how genre-based, translingual, and multimodal pedagogies serve as teaching-for-transfer techniques that actively promote adaptive and dynamic learning transfer in L2 composition classrooms. Rejecting the popular method of teaching L2 composition using modes-based and essay-based writing assignments that are based in the ideology of English monolingualism and prioritize the singular modality of the written text, these innovative pedagogies encourage students to make connections across a variety of different genres, languages, and modes, increasing their rhetorical flexibility and capacity for innovation that is necessary to adapt their knowledge to future unknown writing contexts in the process. Weaving together these novel pedagogies in a sample unit on social media profile genres, this project shows the value of combining multiple different techniques that promote adaptive and dynamic learning transfer in order to better prepare students for the increasingly common 21st century multi-genre, multilingual, and multimodal composing environments they will face in their future personal, academic, and professional lives