Tizard and Hughes wanted to explore how middle-class and working-class homes prepared children for school learning. In particular, they documented the role of mothers in children’s language and cognitive development. They drew on a sample composed of fifteen stay-at-home working-class mothers and their daughters and fifteen middle-class mothers and daughters. Tizard and Hughes audio-taped interactions at home and at school and came to the conclusion that mothers were more “sensitive” to the needs of children than were teachers, and that working-class families were “equal but different” (Walkerdine & Lucey, 1989, p. 6).

At issue for Walkerdine and Lucey (1989) both of working-class backgrounds, was the theorizing that underpinned the make-up of Tizard and Hughes’ sample and the lack of attention in their original analysis to the ways in which the very different material conditions lived by each set of families shaped the meanings and forms of language interactions that were documented. Walkerdine and Lucey weaved their own class and gender subjectivities into their analysis. They argued:

The construction of the sample creates the fiction of a possibility of a working class-middle class comparison by occupational group, for the purposes of predicting what will lead to educational success. Secondly, a simple cause-and-effect model then maps middle class practices and concludes that every difference in the working class is a pathology to be corrected, and if this were corrected, the system of equal opportunities would work. (Walkerdine & Lucey, p. 42)

This sampling and its effects on Tizard's and Hughes’ research conclusions can also be interpreted as a power effect of the dividing strategies of literacy and mothering discourses: working-class mothers and their daughters were identified and positioned in relation to the “normal” mothering and literacy practices of middle-class mothers and their daughters. This positioning signals the ways in which gender and pedagogy are implicated in literacy research, with consequences for the reproduction of mothering discourses in the conclusions that are drawn, the polices adopted and the advice that emanates from such research.