Abstract
Social class has always been a key mediating factor for access to and performance in education, even if the attention it has received has varied: in some cases, it has been minimal, and in other cases, the construct has suffered a kind of erasure (i.e., it has disappeared from the lexicon of researchers). The trend toward the latter has been particularly pronounced in research in language education. This chapter takes on the task of discussing research on language and social class in education. After briefly clarifying what we might mean by social class and what it entails, the chapter first covers early developments in class-based language in education research, before moving on to consider, in order, major contributions, work in progress, problems, and difficulties, and finally, future directions in this area. The aim is to provide the reader with a flavor of past, present, and future work in this all-important corner of language in education research.
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Notes
- 1.
NB From this point onwards, I use the word “class” to refer to “social class” for stylistic reasons.
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Block, D. (2016). Social Class in Language in Education Research. In: King, K., Lai, YJ., May, S. (eds) Research Methods in Language and Education. Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-02329-8_11-1
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