ABSTRACT
The theoretical work of Bernstein is not only complicated and subtle but extremely general and comprehensive’ (Banks, O., 1976, The Sociology of Education, 3rd ed., Batsford, p. 110). In his work on a sociology of language, he has been concerned with the interrelationships among culture, social organization, orientation towards certain uses of language, and social class differences in school achievement. He has argued that there is a relationship between social class, forms of family control and communication, and the linguistic codes used by parents and children. Elaborated codes, characteristic of many middle-class homes, involve speakers in elaborating their meanings and making them both explicit and specific; such codes give children access to universalistic orders of meaning conveyed by teachers in schools. Restricted codes, found particularly but not only in lower working-class homes, are characterized by implicit meaning, simplification and rigidity; such codes give children access to particularistic orders of meaning, which are discontinuous with the universalistic meanings transmitted and developed by teachers in schools. Such linguistic discontinuity forms a crucially important part of the total cultural discontinuity between the culture of the school and that of the working-class child. Though difficult to follow and requiring background reading to fill out and explain many of its points, the extract below summarizes Bernstein’s sophisticated explanation of how social class differences in language-use are related to social class differences in school achievement. (For a critique see pp. 224-6.)
