Class, Codes and Control, Vol. 2: Applied Studies Towards a Sociology of Language

Class, Codes And Control #2

by Basil B. Bernstein (Editor)

Illustrating the effect of class relationships upon the institutionalizing of elaborate codes in the school, the papers in this volume each develop from the previous one and demonstrate the evolution of the concepts discussed.

Genres: Education

377 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 1973

Reviews

[Trevor · Rating 5 out of 5]

I reviewed volume one of this here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... and think that I’m about to begin volume three next. There wasn’t nearly as much of Bernstein’s own writing and research in this one – although this volume is edited by him and the research presented is from his own research group and their work up to the early 1970s. This volume has a Forward and Appendix by Michael Halliday – the linguist who specialises in ‘functional grammar’. In fact, I started reading his Introduction to Functional Grammar a while ago and have been distracted with other things since – but it is now rather urgent that I really put my nose down and read it.

This book is a collection of research papers that test Bernstein’s theory of social class reproduction and language codes. I’m not going to summarise all of the papers. However, there are a few things I do want to say about this book. The first is that the title is much more important than I had fully realised when I was reading the last volume. I tend to think that if people use lots of alliteration in their titles they have been more interested in the jingly-jangly sound created than in the content of the words – terrible assumption, but unfortunately, often correct. In this case these actually are the three keys to understanding Bernstein. Let’s take them in order:

Firstly, social class is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down. Is it related purely to income? To education level of parents? To their profession? In this book they mainly differentiate social class on two factors: the education level and the occupation of both parents (there is an instance where they get caught out in this, only testing the father’s class and a child with a mother with more education than is appropriate for her class ends up skewing their results).

Why is class relevant? Well, the fundamental assumption is that different classes in society have different life experiences. Now, what is interesting in this is that Bernstein follows Halliday’s notion that language is a socially meaningful interaction and so looking at how language ‘means’ is only possible by looking at the social function language has to play. Language is meaningful only according to this social function – but different social classes have different social functions. Therefore, we should expect to find meaningful differences in the language these different classes use – differences that reflect their varied life experiences.

What they make clear repeatedly throughout this book is that no class has a monopoly on effective language. It is like the distinction between grammar as ‘prescriptive’ (that is, a set of rules you need to follow in order to talk proper) and grammar that is ‘descriptive’ (that is, showing how language is used to realise the speaker’s intended meaning). As hard as it is for us, the point is to look at these realisations outside of our own value judgements. Bernstein’s theory is therefore not a theory of working class linguistic deficiency – given he is seeking a descriptive theory, such a value judgement doesn’t make sense. The social relationships that language is required to fulfil for the working class and the language they use are both clearly matched otherwise working class people would not be able to communicate – and clearly they can do that.

Having looked at Class we can now move onto the second of the Cs in the title, Codes. Language can be broken down into three main social realisations: dialect, code and register. Dialect is also divided into three realisations as well, but Bernstein isn’t really as interested in this aspect of language – this is because dialect is something mostly realised either (on the highest level) through time (Shakespeare’s English and ours may both be ‘modern’ but they are also clearly ‘different’ too) or through space (English as it is spoken in North and South England – never mind the US and Australia and India – has many predictable and consistent differences). However, these differences in dialect are poor predictors of social class. Register is also interesting, but again not so much as a means of understanding social class relations to language, although this is more the case than with dialect. Register is how you use language in particular circumstances (say, the differences in the language you use when buying a car compared with when you are describing your holiday to a friend – each requires you to use quite different registers.) A lot of humour is based on playing with inappropriate registers, using language that is appropriate in one context – buy a house, say – in a context where it is not appropriate – asking someone to marry you. When we recognise these contradictions we are recognising differences in register. Now, there doesn’t need to be a difference in the actual words for there to be a difference in meaning and therefore a difference in ‘register’. It is a while since I’ve seen the film, but nearly the first and last scenes of Dirty Harry have virtually the exact same dialogue, but in one Harry is trying to convince someone to not shot at him and to give himself up and in the other he is looking for an excuse to kill the person he is talking to. These differences are realised in changes in intonation and they create a difference in register. The purpose and meaning of those utterances are different in each case – the fact they use the same words is almost beside the point.

Now, Bernstein is mostly interested in Code – something he defined as being realised in two different ways: as a restricted or elaborated code. By restricted code he doesn’t mean that it is restricted to a certain group of people, rather that it is restricted to the situation in which that code is used. Bernstein found that all social classes use a restricted code. One of the standard experiments he used to explain this is to give children a series of four cards and ask them to tell the story these cards displayed. Working class kids tended to use what Bernstein called a restricted code to tell these stories. The pictures where in front of them and they did not see any need to elaborate on what they saw. So, they tended to say things like, ‘he kicked that through there’ – which would be fine if you had the card in front of you and could see the child pointing to one of the three boys playing in the street who had kicked a football through the window of one of the houses. This is Bernstein’s restricted code - for the language to make any sense at all you ‘need to be there’, it is language that is restricted to the immediate situation. Middle class kids also use a restricted code, and did in many circumstances. However, when asked to do this task they tended to use more nouns than pronouns. They tended to say, “A lady is looking out of her window and telling the boys off.” That is, you don’t need to see the cards to understand the intent of the middle class kid’s words. Their language makes no assumptions, it is explicit and elaborated.

One of the things I found particularly interesting here was that I hadn’t previously realised just how restricting the use of pronouns actually is. If you use nouns you can leave the noun quite bare (the woman) or you can add lot of description and qualification (that old, angry woman in the twinset and pearls). You can’t do that with ‘her’ (the old, angry her…). The preferential use of pronouns over nouns leaves us in a much more black and white world. In itself, the use of pronouns might not have been such a huge problem – as we all use pronouns to refer back to more elaborated noun phrases we have already used. But what they found was working class kids used more ‘exophoric’ pronouns – that is, pronouns that were never defined first and only made sense given the external situation.

Control is the third C and in this case it refers to the nature of social control parents (generally) exert on their kids. The headline result is that working class parents tend to assert control using positional authority (‘Why do you have to go to bed? Because I’m your father and I’m telling you to!’) whilst middle class parents tend to assert control through explanation and reason. What is also interesting here is that they found working class and middle class kids tend to get punished for different reasons. Working class kids tend to be punished for the consequences of their actions – whether the action was intended or an accident (“Look, you’ve broken the glass”). Middle class kids tend to be punished only for bad intent, rather than the consequences of their action. This means middle class kids are expected to understand the underlying concept that should motivate their actions.

Now, those are the three Cs – I want to briefly tell you of some of the research. One of the most interesting was right at the start where they asked middle and working class mothers ‘if you weren’t able to speak which of these things would you find hard to teach your kids?’ The things they were asked to explain fell into basically two categories, skills and interpersonal interactions. The working class mothers found skills harder to describe without language, and middle class mothers found interpersonal stuff harder. This fits with Bernstein’s theory because working class mothers should just expect kids to respond to interpersonal relationships according to positional authority. But middle class mothers would need to ‘explain’ the underlying concept behind the interpersonal interaction – something virtually impossible without language.

There is also a very interesting experiment where they ask kids to make up a story and then time the pauses they make while they are making up that story. They were expecting that middle class kids would have longer pauses (necessary as they were less likely to just use ‘stock phrases’ and more likely to be ‘creative’ in their stories). However, what they found was that working class boys had very long pauses (in fact, absurdly long, although, these did not improve their stories when they eventually did speak and so the pauses where long and unproductive). Middle class girls did have longer pause lengths than working class girls, but interestingly this did not result in them telling more interesting stories. However, it seems working class girls were also much more likely to have some responsibility looking after their younger siblings – which might have also involved making up stories for them – so this ‘practice’ may have had an effect on the results.

Once again, I found this very interesting research, but perhaps a bit more detailed than was necessary and so could have been a much shorter book without too much being left out if it had focused more on the results of the research – but then, these are academic papers and method and so on are important. I’m looking forward to starting volume three.