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After briefly outlining Bernstein's personal and educational history, the paper goes on to review the scope of his work over the past 30 years, his theoretical contribution and his position among colleagues in the post-WWII era of British sociology. There follows a more detailed examination of the main tenets of his theory, pointing out that Bernstein's strategy was to present his ideas in the form of dichotomies, such as that between modes of socialization as personal or positional, and of linguistic codes as elaborated or restricted. The paper suggests that while critical issues in educational thinking and in sociology varied through the course of Bernstein's career, such as the study of socialization and its consequences for social reproduction, his dichotomizing remained a constant strategy throughout his writings. I end by briefly referring to my own work that offers some possible alternatives to Bernstein's dichotomies, concluding, however, that the enduring quality of Bernstein owes not a little to the appeal of his overly sharp theoretical distinctions.

This article constitutes a re-reading of and an attempt to rehabilitate Basil Bernstein, both of which are important in light of the interpretation of Bernstein as a proponent of the verbal deficit view, and the general discrediting of his work on social class differences in the British educational system, as related to what he later called ‘codes’, by scholars like Jensen (Social class and verbal learning, Holt, 1968) and Labov (The logic of non-standard English, Georgetown University Press, 1970), in particular. Exploring whether the international criticism of Bernstein was justified entails both an analysis of articles written by Jensen (Social class and verbal learning, Holt, 1968) and Labov (The logic of non-standard English, Georgetown University Press, 1970) and by Bernstein, notably ‘Language and social class’ and ‘A critique of the concept of compensatory education’, both published in the first volume of Class, codes and control (Bernstein, Class, codes and control, Volume 1. Theoretical studies towards a sociology of language, Schocken Books, 1971). The article argues for the importance of contextualising Bernstein's thoughts on language and society within the socio-political climate framing his scholarship and the development of his ideas as a whole. We show that much of the interpretation of Bernstein is, in fact, a misinterpretation, for which Bernstein was only partly at fault. By rehabilitating some of Bernstein's ideas, it is possible to argue for their relevance today, especially with reference to salient connections between socio-cultural background and performance at school. Furthermore, Labov and Bernstein may not have been so far apart in their thinking as has previously been assumed.

Bernstein recognised that his claims about the role of language in education, and the differential success of children from different social strata were effectively claims about underlying psychological processes, and the relationship between language and thought. In attempting to bridge the gap between macro-sociological analyses and individual performance, he sought to draw on existing work in various parts of psychology including the newly emerging discipline of psycholinguistics. Many of these developments were happening in his local academic milieu in London, and he drew on a broad literature. Ultimately, his foray into psychology proved unsuccessful. This was due to a failure to generate the right kind of conceptual clarity necessary for the operational definitions in this type of psychological study. The perspective he offered, however, has merit, and subsequent work has suggested that the failure of his psychological studies was not necessarily a failure of his general proposals.

This article assesses the relevance of Basil Bernstein for German-speaking Switzerland. It argues that Bernstein is potentially relevant for German-speaking Switzerland in light of contemporary studies which highlight a connection between social background and differential school achievement. After contextualising Bernstein's theoretical outlook and critically reflecting upon his use of a static concept of social class, it explores past and present applications of Bernstein. The paper thereby shows that the uptake of Bernstein's outlook was and continues to be minimal for the Swiss German context and reasons for this conclusion are explored. In the final sections of the article connections between social background and differential school achievement are explored for contemporary German-speaking Switzerland. On the basis of this analysis, the paper concludes by arguing that while aspects of Basil Bernstein's theoretical outlook are potentially relevant for the Swiss German context, they need to be reassessed in light of the awareness of the variety of interdependent factors which can and do influence the performance of children and adolescents at school.

This paper begins by looking at responses to Bernstein in Germany in the 1970s that criticized his notions of class difference in sociolinguistic codes. As part of a re-examination of Bernstein's ideas, the paper goes on to look at the current communicative situation in German education where urban schools have many second-generation immigrant students. As part of a long-term research project on communicative styles of young Turkish immigrants in Mannheim (see Keim, Sprachliche Varianz und sprachliche Virtuosität von türkischstämmigen ‘Ghetto’-Jugendlichen in Mannheim, Narr, 2007), I explore the uses of German as a school language or ‘Schriftsprache’, in which culture-specific knowledge of genres used in formal and institutional situations are taught. I find that urban adolescents have a wide stylistic repertoire that contains ethnolectal forms, bi- or multilingual mixings, switchings and crossings as well as forms of ‘schooled language’. Elements of this repertoire are used differentially in oral and written narratives. In this paper I will focus on the use of linguistic and communicative resources in written material from different social contexts (formal vs. informal), reconstruct the discursive or social functions of linguistic choices, and compare the discursive procedures used in oral and written texts.

According to Bernstein (A sociolinguistic approach to socialization; with some reference to educability, Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1972), middle-class parents transmit an elaborated code to their children that relies on verbal means, rather than paralinguistic devices or shared assumptions, to express meanings. Bernstein's ideas were used to argue that working-class and linguistically diverse children in the United States were socialized to use a restricted code. Since peer groups as well as parents can be a source of valuable socialization experiences, the present study examines the communicative resources used among members of a peer group of immigrant children of predominantly Mexican heritage enrolled in a bilingual Spanish–English Head Start preschool in California, while the children are engaged in pretend play. The examples illustrate how the children use a range of communicative resources, both explicit verbalization and more paralinguistic means (e.g., code-switching), to signal for one another what constitutes the common activity they are engaged in and the alignments or ‘footings’ (Goffman, Semiotica: 1–29, 1979) they take to that activity and to each other during the play. The children's communicative resources do not readily fall into a categorization system of ‘elaborated’ and ‘restricted’. The examples suggest ways in which letting bilingual immigrant children use their own peer group style and communicative resources in classrooms may support the children's transition to school-based ways of communicating.

This paper focuses on a little known Bernstein concept of ‘gender codes’ developed in the study of schooling, suggesting that schools transmit hidden gender messages though a range of semiotic devices. Initially, the paper shows how Bernstein's 1970s' research provided a novel way of looking at some critical issues current in educational sociology, to address knowledge transmission and socialization across generational and class differences. Bernstein's focus on the ways argumentation shapes class differentiated social relationships gave a new direction that later became part of language socialization research. His work incorporated several disciplinary traditions, social psychology, social anthropology and structural functional linguistics, to answer sociological questions. The study reported here follows in Bernstein's footsteps by focusing on a rarely studied group, that of mature women students who are the first in their families to go to college, and who combine family life, paid work with their academic studies. Using an analysis that focuses on differences in rhetorical style, the paper examines the different ways in which women construct their narrative selves in describing their differing life trajectories. The research suggests that Bernstein's concept of gender codes does not allow for a more changing and dynamic view of gender and intergenerational relations that any current socialization research requires.