Some remarks on the history of transfer in language studies

Abstract

Transfer is a notion that is pervasive in the modern field of second and third language acquisition. However, the definition of transfer is not easily found. Most of this paper is devoted to a historical overview of the notion of transfer and the changes the definition underwent over the years. At the end of this paper, I sketch a proposal which involves discarding the notion of “transfer” in favor of more computationally efficient options.