The Nature of Knowledge in Composition and Literary Understanding: The Question of Specificity

Psychologists have long debated the extent to which people transfer knowledge from context to context. This debate has emerged in the study of literacy where researchers of composition and literary understanding have begun to examine the extent to which different tasks require particular knowledge and the extent to which different interpretive communities require specific understandings. This article reviews issues related to transfer and knowledge specificity as articulated in psychology and then examines theory and research in composition and literary understanding which parallel the debate in psychology. The authors identify three positions that have emerged in literacy debates: the case for general knowledge, the case for task-specific knowledge, and the case for community-specific knowledge. Each position carries with it certain assumptions about learning and transfer, and each has clear implications for curriculum and instruction. The authors delineate the positions and the assumptions that drive them and detail their instructional consequences, arguing that researchers and teachers need an articulated understanding of their assumptions about knowledge and transfer in order to establish a clear and coherent relationship between theory and practice.