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Culture, Knowledge, and Assessment in Active Learning 15

and their experience of drinking it. Horizontal knowledge is based on competence needed in
one’s immediate milieu.

Another form of knowledge is realised through vertical discourse. Bernstein briefly defines
vertical discourse.

…vertical discourse takes the form of a coherent, explicit, and systematically
principled structure, hierarchically organised, as in the sciences, or it takes the
form of a series of specialised languages with specialised modes of interrogation
and specialised criteria for the production and circulation of texts, as in the social

sciences and humanities.
(Bernstein, 1999, p. 159)

Vertical discourse involves vertical knowledge which are institutionalised or developed
though formal schooling. The abstraction of vertical knowledge makes it generalisable in
different contexts. We understood previously that learning the word น้้ำ (n̂̂ ả) from parents and
experience is an example of horizontal knowledge. As the child attend secondary school, they
learn in Chemistry that water is composed of two atoms of Hydrogen and an atom of Oxygen.
Concepts such as atoms and elements are examples vertical knowledge.

Learners’ development of cognitive framework needed to participate in vertical discourses
commonly starts in formal schooling. However, for most children of high socio-economic
background, it starts at home. Discourses the learners exposed to at home is shaped
predominantly by their parents’ social positioning. Hasan (2002) discovers that children who
have mothers with High Autonomy Professions (HAP) tend to engage in a much semantically
complex discourses than those whose mothers have Low Autonomy Professions (LAP) shown
in examples 1 and 2.

Example 1: HAP mother
Mother: (1) ... you were certainly very brave
Cameron: (2) (? I wasn’t) very brave
Mother: (3) yeah you were brave (4) you mightn’t think you were brave
(5) but I think you were
Cameron: (6) what for?
Mother: (7) because you acted in a very brave way
Cameron: (8) **no

Mother. (9) **you hurt yourself (10) and you cried (11) and that’s good to cry
(12) when you hurt yourself (13) but you only cried for a little while
(14) and then you climbed back on your bike
Cameron: (15) **and didn’t-
Mother: (16) **and when you were a little boy (17) you know what you
would have done?