ABSTRACT
Familiarity also occurs if the tutor and the learner have a history of engaging in activities together. The phenomenon is that limits are set to transfer and generalisation of learning. The manner of that learning in part determines the limits of the transfer of our skills and knowledge. Effective teaching recognises that children bring cognitive and linguistic resources from their familiar and cultural practices. Teachers need to see and be guided by students’ existing knowledge and skills and then construct ‘instructional bridges’ to the unfamiliar. The risk signalled by the study of close reading of familiar and unfamiliar texts goes beyond the idea of too much support provided by the scaffold, to one of support which is very appropriate but which lacks a further dimension, the bridge. The major explanations for the side effects of familiarity draw on the nature of the knowledge embedded in familiar activities and events, or what was referred as ‘domain specificity’.
