Social Class, Maternal Speech and the Child’s Semantic Orientation

Review of Christie (1999): Pedagogy and the Shaping of Consciousness: Linguistic and Social Processes

“…Adlam and Turner (1977) investigated the question of consistency in coding orientation, looking at the texts that children produced in three contexts; see also Bernstein's (1977b) comments. Turner (1993) devised a measure of coding orientation and degree of consistency across contexts, to produce overall profiles of children's speech. Whilst these studies produced results in line with expectations, subject to a number of qualifications, it was noticeable that total consistency across contexts was not common, for either middle-class or working-class children.…”