ABSTRACT
It is an important social fact that working-class (WC) children do not do as well at school as middle-class (MC) children. This is not to say that no WC children are successful in the formal education system. But a WC child has much less chance than a MC child of, say, reaching university. This fact is not in dispute: it poses a problem for educationalists and demands an explanation. Nor is there any dispute over the fact that the language used by WC children is characteristically different from the language of MC children. This is an elementary observation about sociolinguistic diversity in an industrialized society like Britain or the USA.
