This article outlines the concept of readiness to learn (RTL) as a framework for explaining students’ differentiated engagement with the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) curriculum. As documented in student voices, RTL operates along a continuum ranging from preparing to engage, on one end, to enacting TFT, on the other, with beginning to engage in the middle.

Drawing on the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) writing curriculum, this study documents how students in writing courses at four different institutions transferred writing knowledge and practice concurrently into other sites of writing, including other courses, co-curriculars, and workplaces. This research demonstrates that when students, supported by the TFT curriculum, understood that appropriate transfer of writing knowledge and practice is both possible and desirable, (1) they engaged in writing transfer during the TFT course into other sites of writing; (2) they transferred from in-school contexts into out-of-school contexts with facility; and (3) in both cases, they engaged in a just-in-time transfer.

In this article we consider the ways in which college writers make use of prior knowledge as they take up new writing tasks. Drawing on two studies of transfer, both connected to a Teaching for Transfer composition curriculum for first-year students, we  articulate a theory of prior knowledge and document how the use of prior knowledge can detract from or contribute to efficacy in student writing.