ABSTRACT
It might be useful to recall the development of the work that leads up to the present analysis. Up to the 1980s, the work was directed to an understanding of different principles of pedagogic transmission/acquisition, their generating contexts and change. These principles were conceptualised as code modalities. However, what was transmitted was not in itself analysed apart from the classification and framing of the categories of the curriculum. In the mid-1980s, what was transmitted became the focus of the analysis (Bernstein, 1986). A theory of the construction of pedagogic discourse, its distributive, recontextualising and evaluative rules, and their social basis, was developed: the pedagogic device. However, the forms of the discourses, that is, the internal principles of their construction and their social base, were taken for granted and not analysed. Thus, there was an analysis of modalities of elaborated codes and their generating social contexts, and an analysis of the construction of pedagogic discourse which the modalities of elaborated codes presupposed, but no analysis of the discourses subject to pedagogic transformation.
