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Concept
Basil Bernstein
Summary
Basil Bernard Bernstein (1 November 1924 – 24 September 2000) was a British sociologist known for his work in the sociology of education. He worked on socio-linguistics and the connection between the manner of speaking and social organization.
Bernstein was born on 1 November 1924, into a Jewish immigrant family, in the East End of London. After teaching and doing social work for a time, in 1960 Bernstein began graduate work. He enrolled at University College London, where he completed his PhD in linguistics. He then moved to the Institute of Education at the University of London where he worked the remainder of his career. He became Karl Mannheim Chair of the Sociology of Education, Institute of Education.
On 4 June 1983, Bernstein was awarded the honorary degree "Doctor of the University" by the Open University (Milton Keynes, England).
Bernstein made a significant contribution to the study of communication with his sociolinguistic theory of language codes, which was developed to explain inequalities based on social class as found in language use. The theory holds that there are elaborated and restricted codes within the broader category of language codes.
The term code, as defined by Stephen Littlejohn in Theories of Human Communication (2002), "refers to a set of organizing principles behind the language employed by members of a social group" (2002) suggests that Bernstein's theory shows how the language people use in everyday conversation both reflects and shapes the assumptions of a certain social group. Furthermore, relationships established within the social group affect the way that group uses language, and the type of speech that is used. Language, for Bernstein, is critical since it serves as the intermediary of social structure in the general theory of cultural transmission.
The construct of restricted and elaborated language codes was introduced by Bernstein in the 1960s. As an educator, he was interested in accounting for the relatively poor performance of working-class students in language-based subjects, when they were achieving scores as high as their middle-class counterparts on mathematical topics.
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