For example (and see Kahney 1986) we struggle to solve the ‘jealous husbands’ problem. (How do you get three husbands and three wives across town in a very small taxi which holds only three, while preserving chaperones? No wife may be left with any men without her husband present. You know how husbands are.) After much mental effort we reach a solution. Hurrah! We take a coffee break. Then we are set the ‘missionaries and cannibals’ problem. (There are three cannibals and three missionaries on one side of a river. They have to get across this river but have only a very small canoe which holds only three. The cannibals must never outnumber the missionaries. You know how good missionaries taste.) Almost incredibly, we are hardly any better at the second problem, having solved the first, than we would have been if we had never seen either. We will struggle to almost exactly the same extent with another isomorphic problem after lunch (cats and canaries perhaps?) unless someone points out that there may be similarities in the structures and demands of these problems and specifically desires us to step back and consider the shape of these problems per se, instead of the immediate detail of possible moves. We seem to be slow to realise that hard-won skills and knowledge may be generalisable; we have to be told deliberately to think about how to generalise learning and we have to be told to deliberately recall and apply learning elsewhere than where we initially did. This extraordinarily embarrassing truth is very pertinent to the teacher. The fact seems to be that we have to be told to learn, and then to seek to recall and employ, general (as opposed to specific) problem-solving skills when faced with problems. We need to be taught to consider problem solving per se and not solely focus on any particular problem in marvellous isolation. Thus it is with all learned skills - unless taught deliberately to seek and deploy them, we don’t. Learning to generalise newly learned skills, learning to deliberately seek and apply these skills, amounts to a meta-issue. This is learning about learning, thinking about thought, applying skills to the application of skills. It is meta-cognition, and it is a skill which can be learned.

To take a teacher’s example (Amicie Thompson: personal communication 2001): A group of students have just learned about genre, and critical reading (Christie (in Littlefair 1994), Kress 1994, McCormack 1990, Millard 1997) as part of your drive to instil the habits of critical language awareness when reading text (Clark & Ivanic 1997, Fairclough 1992, Lankshear et al 1997, Luke 2000). The students have learned to use these meta-reading ideas in the context, say, of a piece of advertising copy. The message has clearly got across well. Critical reading and language awareness have been perfectly understood and enthusiastically and intelligently applied. Every student has understood and deployed these techniques well. Happiness all round. At their next class, a week later, however, you are disappointed to find that these approaches are not spontaneously applied by a single student when another piece of writing - a newspaper article with an obvious agenda perhaps - is being considered by the group. You therefore remind them of it. There are widespread cries of happy recognition and critical reading is immediately applied again joyfully and cleverly to the new text. Next week, however, as you feared, much the same happens. Thus it will, apparently, always be until we step right back and specifically teach the technique of overtly seeking, recalling and applying techniques. In this instance, until we teach that reading should involve the deliberate invocation of techniques like suspicious reading or critical language awareness per se. The importance of genre and how to read intelligently, with critical awareness of the ways language can be deployed, are easily enough learned - the trick is to learn deliberately to look for, and then use, these tools whenever we read and not to plunge completely into text to the exclusion of such appropriately sceptical techniques.

The transfer of learning from one situation into another is not, apparently, an innate feature of human intelligence. Left to our own devices we don’t do it well. It is clearly a rare skill. Let us not be downcast on that account, however; skills can be learned. The skills of thinking about language and its use - considering genre, bias, intent, style etc. - comprise meta-linguistics. Students must be taught these skills, and explicitly taught also to recall and deploy them.