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This article presents Basil Bernstein's response to an article by Michael Huspek which advanced a theory of the relationship between social class and communication codes. Bernstein acknowledges that a developing theory creates a burden for those who engage with it. Such a theory requires its readers a recency of reading. In the case of Huspek he seems to have parted company with the theory well before 1975. The major arguments derived from papers published well before 1970. The section headed A Reconsideration of Bernstein's Descriptions of Working-class Speech draws entirely from a paper published in 1962, and the description of codes reduced syntactic complexity goes back to a paper published in 1958. According to Bernstein, it is therefore difficult, if not possible, to comment on Huspek's paper without summarizing or at least referring to developments of the last 20 years. Developments which not only have escaped Huspek, but perhaps equally seriously have escaped the anonymous reviewers whom Huspek acknowledges. Bernstein's comments is grouped under two headings: Social Class and Education, and Class and Oppositional Codes. Huspek points out that Bernstein has operated with a two level model of empirical research.

This paper reports social class differences in the emphasis placed upon the use of language in two areas of the socialization of the child: inter-person relationships and the acquisition of basic skills. The sample of 100 mothers is a sub-sample of 120 mothers who live in a middle class area and 192 mothers who live in a working class area. (The correlation between area and the social class position of the family is 0.74.) The results obtained from the use of a closed schedule show that the middle class mothers, relative to the working class mothers, place a much greater emphasis upon the use of language in the person area; whereas the working class mothers, relative to the middle class mothers, place a greater emphasis upon the use of language in the transmission of basic skills. The results are consonant with the prediction derived from the theory of restricted and elaborated linguistic codes which has also been used to generate a model for the understanding of social learning and forms of cultural discontinuity between the home and the school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a research note which discusses the relation between languages and social class. Linguistic differences, other than dialect, occur in the normal social environment and status groups may be distinguished by their forms of speech. This difference is most marked where the gap between the socio-economic levels is very great. It is suggested that the measurable inter-status differences in language facility result from entirely different modes of speech found within the middle-class and the lower working-class. It is proposed that the two distinct forms of language use arise because the organization of the two social strata is such that different emphases are placed on language potential. The role intelligence plays is to enable the speaker to exploit more successfully possibilities symbolized by the socially determined forms of language use. It is suggested that the typical, dominant speech mode of the middle class is one where speech becomes an object of special perceptual activity and a theoretical attitude is developed towards the structural possibilities of sentence organization. This is not the case for members of the lower working class.