From Graham Thomas
Your article by Aviva Rutkin highlighted the marked difference between the language of children from poor and more affluent backgrounds (29 November, p 14).
This difference was identified in landmark research by Basil Bernstein at the University of London’s Institute of Education more than half a century ago.
He characterised the language of working-class children as “limited code” and that of middle-class children as “elaborated code”. A 10-year study of interactions between mothers and children from the two social backgrounds was subsequently led by his sometime colleague Ruqaiya Hasan, later of Macquarie University in Australia.
St Albans, Hertfordshire, UK
