Basil Bernard Bernstein (1 November 1924 – 24 September 2000)[1] was a British sociologist known for his work in the sociology of education.
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.
Language, for Bernstein, is critical since it serves as the intermediary of social structure in the general theory of cultural transmission.
[6] 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.
According to Bernstein in Class, Codes and Control (1971): Forms of spoken language in the process of their learning initiate, generalize and reinforce special types of relationship with the environment and thus create for the individual particular forms of significance (p.76).That is to say that the way language is used within a particular societal class affects the way people assign significance and meaning to the things about which they are speaking.
Littlejohn (2002) agrees and states, "people learn their place in the world by virtue of the language codes they employ" (p. 178).
The most extended empirical examination of Bernstein's code theory was a 10-year project conducted at Macquarie University by Ruqaiya Hasan.
It is economical and rich, conveying a vast amount of meaning with a few words, each of which has a complex set of connotations and acts like an index, pointing the hearer to a lot more information which remains unsaid.
The restricted code is less formal with shorter phrases interjected into the middle or end of a thought to confirm understanding.
For example, “you know”, “you know what I mean”, “right?” and “don’t you think?” Elaborated codes have a longer, more complicated sentence structure that uses uncommon words and thoughts.
In the elaborated code there is no padding or filler, only complete, well laid out thoughts that require no previous knowledge on the part of the listener, i.e., necessary details will be provided.
According to Bernstein (1971), a working class person communicates in restricted code as a result of the conditions in which they were raised and the socialisation process.
Bernstein emphasised that 'code' was not dialect and that code theory was neither a bourgeois alibi for middle-class speech nor a denigrating deficit account of working-class language.
The dichotomy between elaborated and restricted codes actually holds multiple distinct oppositions, such an implicit/explicit, personal/impersonal, and universal vs context-specific meanings, which aren't always correlated.
Critics have pointed out that academic communication, even in the industrialized West, is heavily reliant on shared background information.
Meanwhile, ethnographic studies showed how Western-style schools, far from being decontextualized and suited for an autonomous code, have strong linguistic and interactional expectations.
Bernstein defines a "hierarchical knowledge structure" as ‘a coherent, explicit and systematically principled structure, hierarchically organised’ which ‘attempts to create very general propositions and theories, which integrate knowledge at lower levels, and in this way shows underlying uniformities across an expanding range of apparently different phenomena’ (1999: 161, 162), such as physics.