In order to study social-class interactions on language effectiveness, three reading tests were administered to two groups of equally bright middle and working-class Indian children of 100 each, who were randomly selected from a large sample of boys, from different secondary schools, comprising of the top 27 % on a verbal and a non-verbal intelligence test. Parent's occupation and education were the criteria for class-placement. On all the tests the middle-class emerged significantly superior (p < .01). The second part, attempting to find the correlates of high and low language effectiveness, administered Academic Motivation and Study Habit inventories and both were found to be more strongly related to the composite reading scores of the working-class than those of the middle-class, where study habit was even insignificantly related.