"Experience Coding" and Linguistic Variation

• In Event: Multilingual Perspectives on Translanguaging

Abstract

The proposed presentation is about social linguistic variation and communities. In it, I use the term “experience coding” in a quite specific way—and in a way unrelated to the term “experiential coding” as it is sometimes used in qualitative research methods and as an approach to advertising. I am not talking here about codes for research, but coding in the sense of assigning meanings to symbols in contexts of used. In particular, I want to talk about “codes” in terms of my interpretation of how Basil Bernstein meant (or should have meant) the term “code” (Bernstein 1997, 2000). The term was crucial to Bernstein’s work but badly misunderstood, especially by American linguists (e.g., Labov 1972), something not helped by Bernstein’s own explications at times. I am not concerned whether I am right or wrong about Bernstein. Either way, I am using him for my own ends here.

This paper is about a key source of linguistic variation, one which has been called “social languages” (Gee 1999, 2000, 2004). Social languages are a form of “experience coding.” Such coding is centered on how people use their social knowledge and experiences to communicate as a certain “type of person” (Hacking 1986, 2006). Social languages are, thus, something like a Morse code for socially meaningful identities. Experiential coding is about meaning first and foremost. Linguistic structure (‘grammar’) enters the scene here as a tool for this coding, but a tool that serves many other purposes as well. This renders the relationship between experiential coding and grammar complicated and an issue that needs great care if we are not to replicate linguistic prejudices (and it is this issue that got Bernstein in trouble).

The paper is meant to have important implications for how educators should deal with language, sense making, and identity not just in language teaching, but in a great many other areas, since much of what we learn in and out of school is not just “content” (information), but new “ways with word.” In one sense, all learning is a form of language acquisition, the acquisition of different social languages or new ways to code experience—remembering that the claim that “humans learn from experience” is at the heart of modern theories of teaching and learning. In this sense, we are all multilinguals, and multilingualism is a universal human attribute.

Author

• James Paul Gee, Arizona State University
  Presenting Author