Language Diversity in the Classroom - ymerleksi - home

The Language Debate 97deficit, indeed when you have actually stated... that ‘‘the normallinguistic environment of the working class is one of linguisticdeprivation’’.There is a Jewish proverb, Rosen reminds us, about trying to dance attwo weddings at the same time.Bernstein’s linguistic insights centered upon ‘public’ and ‘formal’variants. The former, he said, is chiefly characterized by an emphasisupon ‘the emotive rather than the logical implications’ (Bernstein, 1958:164) of language; and subsequent elaborations (Bernstein, 1959) revealthat public language is grammatically simple, and generally limited inexpressive possibilities. Its users, like those lower-class respondentsdescribed by Schatzman and Strauss (whose work Bernstein acknowledged),apparently have few syntactic and lexical alternatives, and arerestricted to concrete and non-symbolic modes of expression. Publiclanguage is essentially the only linguistic variant available to the lowerclass. On the other hand, middle-class speakers while willing and ableto use the public variety also have access to ‘formal’ language.Bernstein described this as essentially the mirror image of its poorercounterpart. Where the latter is simple, semantically implicit andconceptually weak, formal language is grammatically complex, semanticallyexplicit and rich in symbolic possibilities.In his earlier papers, Bernstein (1958, 1959, 1960) referred tocharacteristics of lower-class children often cited by the environmentaldeficittheorists: difficulty in delaying immediate gratification and ofplanning for the future, ‘volatile’ expressive behavior and so on. Herelated the linguistic variants to those of social milieu, noting that:one mode [of speech], associated with the middle-class, points to thepossibilities within a complex conceptual hierarchy for the organizationof experience, the other, associated with the lower working-class,progressively limits the type of stimuli to which the child learns torespond. (Bernstein, 1960: 276)Before long, to complete what appears to be quite a well-rounded pictureof deficiency, ‘public’ and ‘formal’ language variants were translated intothe more well-known ‘restricted’ and ‘elaborated’ codes (see Bernstein,1962a). Bernstein’s early experimental data are found in four connectedpapers (1958, 1960, 1962a, 1962b), and the most salient findings revealedclass differences in verbal performance between public-school boys, onthe one hand, and working-class messenger boys, on the other. Theinferior verbal abilities of the messengers were to be explained, Bernstein