Reading Classes: On Culture and Classism in America

by Barbara Jensen

Bernstein’s example of psycholinguistic training in middle class children starts with a mother who says to her child, “I’d rather you made less noise, Darling.” However idealized (and British) this sentence may be, it is a good model of middle class language use (1958, 162). To demonstrate how culture is communicated through language, Bernstein took the sentence apart to see what it does besides asking the child to be quieter. This sentence has a clear “I” and “you,” which helps in the development of a sense of individuality through the negotiation between the “I” of the mother and the “I” of the child. On her porch, when Sally asked Jacob to be quieter, Jacob banged the toy truck a wee bit softer, saying, “Is this less?” “Not enough, Jacob.” He banged a little softer, “How ’bout this?” “That’s still too loud, Honey.” At this point he started barely touching the truck to the porch floor, “Mom! What about this?” “That’s better, thank you,” Sally said. Don’t ask me where Sally gets her patience, but she did run that child-care center for years. Jacob then tapped it louder, repeating his question, “How ’bout this?” It is not so much that Jacob was concerned with finding the exact amount of noise he could make as that he was taken with the game of negotiation (and keeping his mother’s attention). Sally, too, was as interested in how they were engaged as she was about the noise Jacob was making.