Basil Bernstein was born in 1924 to a Jewish immigrant family in the East End of London. In 1960, he enrolled at University College London , where he completed his doctorate in linguistics . He subsequently moved to the Institute of Education , where he remained for his entire career and became dean of the sociology faculty. In June 1983, he received an honorary degree from the Open University as a Doctor of the University.
The verbal deprivation theory
Basil Bernstein is considered one of the most influential sociolinguists of the 900th century; one of his most famous theories is that of the so-called " verbal deprivation ", developed and made known in Italy between the late 60s and the early 70s. According to the sociolinguist, the class system influences the social distribution of knowledge , that is, only a portion of the population reaches " the level of metalanguages of control and innovation, while the great mass of the population has been socialized in knowledge only at the level of operations linked to the context ". Basil Bernstein talks to us about two different models of language: universalistic and particularistic . In the first, mental operations are made explicit and in the second they remain implicit. Through a series of interviews with a sample of students, he came to the conclusion that " academic success depends to a large extent on verbal ability , which in turn is positively correlated with average-to-high social status ".
The use of language
Through socialization, children who belong to a working class family acquire a restricted code, while those who belong to a middle class, a elaborate codeThe former creates context-dependent and implicit meanings, while the elaborated code is based on individualized roles and explicit, situation-independent meanings. The different academic performance of working-class and middle-class children, therefore, does not depend on the greater intelligence of the latter but is linked to differences in the use of the language and of the different linguistic codes. The transmission of one code rather than another depends largely on the fundamental process of socialization in the early years of a child's life. Bernstein himself, however, emphasizes that it would be wrong to judge the use of the two linguistic systems, since even a narrow code allows access to a multiplicity of meanings. The problem, he argues, is that in schools in complex societies, only the more elaborate code is taken into consideration, while the linguistic knowledge of working-class children is largely underestimated.
Bernstein's Legacy
Bernstein was also important for his numerous empirical works, such as the experiment he conducted in a school to demonstrate the different use of linguistic codes based on social class. He showed a sample of children, some working-class and some middle-class, a series of images that, when linked together, created a story. The children were then asked to describe what they saw. The results showed what the scholar had argued: students from different social classes told the story using different language. Those from the middle classes used explicit, unrelated expressions: "the child threw the ball against the window and the window broke”, while the children from the working class used a more restricted and implicit language: “he threw it and it broke”. Bernstein, therefore, tried to show how the class system acted on the deep structure of the communication through the process of socialization. He concluded, however, by emphasizing that socialization is not based exclusively on language but encompasses numerous aspects. He also emphasized that all children, regardless of their social context, use a narrow code; but only some of them also acquire a more elaborate language.
Despite some initial criticism, Bernstein made significant contributions to the study of the relationship between education and language ; his coding theory has been important for numerous studies in various fields such as education, teaching, and learning.
Giulia Borsetto
