This article examines the potential relationship between children's knowledge of media texts, formed outside school in informal contexts, and the different kinds of textual knowledge schools themselves construct and validate. Drawing on Bernstein's concepts of horizontal and vertical discourse, the article argues that knowledge acquired in the informal domain cannot transfer over intact into the official domain of schooling, and that children themselves recognize this. While middle class and working class children evolve broadly similar competencies around media texts in the informal domain, they demonstrate a markedly different take on the organization of schooled knowledge. Schooling shows them different social futures.
This article takes as its topic the relationship between the social organization of literacy in the informal domain and the social organization of schooled literacy, using as its focus, media texts and their place inside and outside school. The article will draw on research data documenting children's consumption of a range of media texts, circulating outside official school contexts, over a 4-year period. The media encompassed TV and video, as well as print media such as comics, magazines, and books. The data were collected in a series of interlinked research projects, which tracked the same children between 1989 and 1993. An unusually rich source of data was obtained, which throws light on how tastes are formed and how they change over an extended period. The children were aged between 7 and 11 when recruited to the first project, and between 11 and 15 when the final project finished. 1 They were based in four London schools: an inner city secondary school and one of its feeder primary schools, and a suburban, selective secondary school and one of its feeder primary schools. The data is in the form of interviews and questionnaires conducted over the 4-year period.