Social class differences in language predictability : written

Two cloze-tests were constructed from written essays encoded by 80 first-year university students of middle-class and working-class origin. In a second experimental situation, 46 tertiary subjects were asked to ' fill in ' the missing cloze deletions of these written passages. Within the terms of the Bernstein elaborated-restricted code framework it was posited that, since working class language is thought to be characterized by greater lexical and structural predict-ability, these passages would facilitate the decoding task. The analysis was based firstly on a ' verbatim ' cloze completion criterion and secondly utilized an information theory approach. Results on the h t criterion indicated significant social class differences (higher predictability of working-class messages on lexical and total cloze deletions) ; whereas those on the second criterion were non-significant. Possible implications of the study for teaching were explored. For the last decade, explanations of verbal coding procedures, particularly those involving social-class contrast, have relied heavily on a theoretical framework derived from the British sociologist, Basil Bernstein. The develo