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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?
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