Social Class Differences in the Relevance of Language to Socialization

Abstract

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.