An Analysis Of Code Orientation Of Children Of Chinese Migrant Workers In Primary Education:

Education in essence is a form of cultural transmission and education system itself is shaped by the social structure. With elaborated code and restricted code as the core concepts, Bernstein’s Code Theory attempts to illustrate the complex relationship among code, cultural transmission and social reproduction, and it reveals the divergence of children from different family backgrounds in acquiring the distinct modes of linguistic codes. The present thesis attempts to conduct an empirical research on children of Chinese migrant workers at the elementary level in school education, which draws upon Bernstein’s Code Theory as the theoretical foundation, and then goes through a detailed sociolinguistic analysis with an aim to explore the code orientation carried by the children of migrant workers.On the basis of the available literature and particularly of the empirical analysis, this study attempts to address the following three research questions:(1) What are the distinct features of the linguistic codes possessed by the children of migrant workers in class?(2) What are the expression differences carried by the linguistic codes that are transmitted by the children of migrant workers from a sociolinguistic perspective?(3) What are the internal and external coding mechanism which drive the force to the elaboration or restriction of linguistic codes?The thesis finally reaches the conclusion that the linguistic codes possessed by the children of migrant workers belong to the type of restricted codes which carries the features including context-dependent and implicit. And from the perspective of sociolinguistics, the distinct mode of linguistic codes oriented by the children of migrant workers renders the expression differences on the aspect of language systematicness, logicality and literariness in comparison to their counterparts. Nevertheless, the home schooling and regular schooling, which are working as the internal and external driving force to the coding mechanism, contribute to the restriction and elaboration of the linguistic codes.The present study explores the applicability of Bernstein’s Code Theory to empirical research in contemporary China, and is expected to have some positive implications for language education for the children of migrant workers and other vulnerable social classes in the present context, which is assumed to be of great theoretical and practical significance.