Reading: Class, Codes and Control by Basil Bernstein

   British sociologist Basil Bernstein formulated a theory of speech use as it pertained to social class and performance in education.  He was someone whose name often cropped up in my graduate reading, yet I had never read his Class, Codes and Control (1971) until recently. This classic text is a collection of Bernstein’s research papers essentially; it is serious, moral and rigorous.  Along with many others, I think Bernstein was on to something, and I would like to very briefly outline what he discovered, and how those findings may relate to the EFL classroom in Taiwan.

Bernstein posited a theory of language use among middle class and working/lower class children.  (We immediately come up against the problem of defining social class, but I’m not going to go into that here.)  He discovered that there were in operation different modes of speech within the middle class and the lower class that progressively orientated the speakers to distinct and different types of relationships to objects and persons, irrespective of the level of measured intelligence.  The language used functioned as a kind of code and reflected a particular form of social relationship or qualities of the social structure.  He called these two codes elaborated speech and restricted, or public, speech.

In the middle class family, a child learns a subtle arrangement of words and connections between sentences to convey feeling, said Bernstein.  The language is therefore relatively complex, and may be termed formal.  Syntactic elements will be used to organise meaning.  The child selects from a range of linguistic resources to make a verbal arrangement that fits specific referents.  Meanings are relatively explicit, and the speaker is sensitive to the implications of separateness — the middle class child is encouraged to be an individual at a very young age.  This elaborated code of speaking requires a long period of formal and informal learning to master well.  Importantly, mastery of the elaborated code allows the child to respond to and exploit the formality of school. 

Bernstein went to great lengths to describe the restricted code used by working/lower class families/children.  This was because he was trying to find out why on the whole these children tended to do less well at school, while some even failed completely.  He therefore thoroughly investigated the features of this code, and the sociology of the working class family, and I can barely do justice to his analysis in a mere paragraph.  Let me try to highlight a few features.  The purpose of the restricted code was to orientate the child in a particular direction, toward group solidarity in effect.  The code tended to consist of short, grammatically simple, syntactically poor sentences, which are ill-equipped to facilitate the expression of processes.  The restricted, or public, code produces social rather than individual symbols and emphasises immediacy of interaction; it is descriptive rather than analytic.  This concern with the immediate prevents the development of a reflective experience.  Children are strongly discouraged from expressing tender feelings, for example.  The language used is typically direct, concrete, activity-dominated, and impersonal and has a narrow lexical range.  This is not to say the restricted code is inferior to the elaborated code, indeed it is capable of a wide and beautiful range of expression, but it does not sit well in the school setting.  As Bernstein points out “[the] restricted code gives access to a vast potential of meanings, of delicacy, subtlety, and diversity of cultural forms…but [it is] devalued or even humiliated in schools.”

Possibly the most important thing Bernstein had to say about these two codes, and again I’m simplifying here, is that access to a code for the child is dependent on access to specialised social positions within the social structure, and that the lower working class child has no access to the elaborated code at home.  This puts such a child at a disadvantage in the school setting, and can even be a serious problem since learning the elaborated code implies a change of identity.  Not all children want to be middle class, or see that as a desirable attribute; for these children school can be a place where their self-respect is challenged.  They may well become disruptive as a consequence of this threat to their identity.  The middle class child, on the other hand, has access to and can use both speech codes, giving them a distinct advantage over their working class classmates in school and in life.  Bernstein notes, “If a child is to succeed as he [Sic] progresses through school it becomes critical for him [Sic] to possess or at least to be orientated towards, an elaborated code

Highly critical in nature, Bernstein’s work has serious implications for all educators.  Let me now try to put the above into a Taiwan EFL classroom context.  The teacher should be aware of the varying class backgrounds of children and how this effects their speech patterns, behaviour and orientation to learning.  Teachers in Taiwan often identify some learners as “good”, whereas what they have really discovered is that a child is middle class and therefore fitting in well to the school environment.  To put it another way, there are no “good” or “bad” students, but learners of varying social class background with attendant sociological/linguistic/behavioural characteristics.  To reduce language teaching to a series of input-output problems is to trivialise the educational process, which is ultimately sociological in nature.  

   Bernstein makes a strong case for the use of multiple criteria of qualitative assessment, and for schools not to wholly rely on quantitative assessment, in order to take learners’ class background into account.  Crucially, the teacher must not see the “slow” learner as being deficient in some way.  Rather the teacher is required to adopt a position of respect and understanding toward all learners irrespective of their social background or apparent abilities.  Bernstein puts it very well when he says, “If the culture of the teacher is to become part of the consciousness of the child, then the culture of the child must first be in the consciousness of the teacher…We should start knowing that the social experience the child already possesses is valid and significant…” (emphasis added).