Cultural Capital, Reading, Language Development, and Educational Attainment

According to P. Bourdieu, the scarcity of cultural capital, often found in lower-SES family social spaces, places lower-SES students at a disadvantage in schools and, in turn, significantly hinders their academic performance. While this approach provides powerful insights into the phenomenon of cultural reproduction, it may overemphasize the status of highbrow cultures, thereby overlooking, as the school of cultural mobility argues, the influence of environmental conditions that regulate the returns to cultural capital. Furthermore, the structural perspective of cultural capital underestimates the influence of agency on educational results. Since lower-SES students are situated in family and school spaces simultaneously, and the latter is rich in educational resources, this synchronicity enables schools to generate compensatory cultural capital for this student group by leveraging those resources. It has been reported that reading can significantly enhance students’ cognitive skills and reading comprehension, which are prerequisites for understanding academic knowledge. It can be inferred that reading engagement significantly benefits students in developing an elaborated code, akin to an academic habitus. At this point, reading resources and activities serve as a gateway to ameliorate the phenomenon of cultural reproduction. Considering the interplay between cultural capital, reading, habitus, coding orientations, and learning outcomes, this section calls for papers on related themes as follows:

a. cultural capital and educational attainment
b. cultural mobility and environmental settings
c. code theory and sociolinguistics
d. agency and social spaces
e. reading and literacy comprehension skills
f. teaching and reading engagement