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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

At one time, academic inquiries into the relationship between socioeconomic class and language acquisition were commonplace, but the past 20 years have seen a decrease in work that focuses on the intersection between class and early language learning. Recently, however, against the backdrop of the No Child Left Behind legislation in the United…

This study examines how English speakers address, and are addressed by, their Japanese colleagues in Japan, and the deciding factors and motivation for the choice of address-forms in a given context. The local norms of English and Japanese are also examined through interviews with 15 British and 15 Japanese office workers in their home countries,…

This paper explores the role of the court interpreter in cross-cultural and cross-linguistic communication in the courtroom. Drawing on the analysis of the discourse of witness examinations interpreted by Korean interpreters in Australian court proceedings, this paper argues that in the absence of cultural and/or linguistic explanations by the…

Examining the linguistic repertoire of the Anglophone community living in Montreal, this article provides an analysis of the representations of the variety of French spoken by the first generation of young Anglophones who had experienced different types of contact with French. The relation between functional competence and usage of French is…

Although the literature on CS between Arabic and French in different bilingual speech communities is wide, few studies have dealt with the Tunisian context and no previous work has ever been done on the Tunisian business sector as a specific group using more than one pair of languages to communicate. This case study investigates the variety of…

This study examines how bilingual family members use language choice and language alternation as a local scheme of interpretation to distinguish different and often contesting social identities in interaction. It is argued that the playful creation of oppositional identities in interaction relieves the speakers from responsibility and creates a…

This paper examines how the interconnected aspects of the stance triangle (Du Bois 2007) allow speakers to tap into multiple ideological layers as they take a stance and reveal intra-ethnic group tensions. Using a detailed interaction analysis of a Chinese American family's multilingual interaction, the paper explores how such ideological dynamics…

Li Wei (1995) notes that relatively little sociolinguistic work on bilingualism has attempted to analyze and compare the complex relationships between aspects of language choice and code-switching among subgroups of the same community. This study aims to investigate the co-existence of two structurally different Cantonese-English code-switching…

This paper explores interpreting in three-generational Italian-English bilingual families as a complex language brokering activity. Recent studies approach non-professional interpreting as language brokering in which bilinguals (often children) interpret for non-bilinguals (adults) in institutional settings (Hall 2004; Valdes 2003). These studies…

Speakers often perform impromptu translations during bilingual interaction. Such translations can hold a wide variety of socio-pragmatic functions including reiteration, emphasis, recasting, and repair. When translations occur in multi-party talk where the interactants are of mixed linguistic proficiencies, they may also serve to include…