Fez - Socialization refers to the process whereby a child acquires a specific cultural identity and his responses to such an identity. It also indicates the process whereby the biological is transformed into a specific cultural being.
Fez – Socialization refers to the process whereby a child acquires a specific cultural identity and his responses to such an identity. It also indicates the process whereby the biological is transformed into a specific cultural being.
Indeed, it is a very complex process of control, in which a particular moral, cognitive, and affective consciousness is developed in the child and given a specific form and content. Socialization is a critical process which teaches kids social orderings and ways of behaving according to a stratified paradigm; coming to fruition in the familial milieu, the peer group, and the work place. In relation to education, to what extent does the socialization process affect the linguistic performance at school?
A number of sociological factors influence, to a large degree, the linguistic competence and performance of kids at school, including the social class, the social context, and the code theory. To start with, the class structure influences work and educational roles and brings families into special relationships with each other. The class system has strongly influenced the distribution of knowledge within society.
The main focal point in the sociological study of the socialization process in relation to education rests upon the fact that a small percentage of the population has been given access to the principles of intellectual changes, whereas the rest have been denied such access. In this regard, a distinction can be made between two orders of meaning: universalistic and particularistic. Universalistic meaning refers to those in which principles and operations are made linguistically explicit, whereas particularistic orders of meaning are made linguistically implicit. These different orders of meaning are essentially and relatively determined by the forms of socialization that direct the child towards speech codes.
Another equally important factor is access to codes of speech that control access to relatively context-tied or relatively context-independent meanings. In here, codes of speech are mainly divided into two types: elaborated code and restricted code. These codes restrain the contextual use of language in critical socializing contexts and in this manner regulate the orders of relevance and relationships.
Social context is of paramount importance in the socialization process of children, which involves social roles and speech variants. Variant is considered to be the contextual constraints upon grammatical-lexical choices. The closer the identifications of speakers, the greater the range of mutual interests and the higher the probability that speech will take a certain form. The form of social relationships is acting so dynamically and selectively on the meanings as to be verbally realized.
In one of Bernstein’s studies, he mentioned an empirical study done in one of the British schools. Students from both working and middle classes were asked to tell a story describing a series of pictures. The results were that working class students used many pronouns, and their stories could be only understood by looking at the pictures, whereas middle class students created descriptions rich in nouns, and their stories could be grasped without looking at the pictures.
Bernstein distinguished between the restricted code, which is characteristic of the working class, and the elaborated code, which is related to the middle class. He states that restricted codes are context-dependent and particularistic, whereas elaborated codes are context-independent and universalistic. Bernstein argues that restricted codes are not deficient, but rather are functionally related to the social division of labor, where context-dependent language is necessary in the context of production. Likewise, the elaborated code of middle classes represents functional changes entailed by changes in the division of labor and the middle class’s new position in reproduction process, rather than production. Due to the fact that schools require an elaborated code for success, the working classes are disadvantaged by the dominant code of school, and not because their language is deficient.
Edited by Melissa Smyth
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