Putting the F in NEA: making language investigations work

The latest guest blog comes from David Chew, a teacher in the East Midlands. Here he looks at how he approaches the NEA language investigation from its earliest ideas and inception through to the detailed analysis needed to make it work, and he looks at how the mysterious F score can add a new dimension to discussions of formality in texts. 

“It’s more maths and science than a literature essay.”  This is my opening announcement to a class of English Language students as we embark on the AQA Language Investigation NEA (coursework). The subsequent groans could fill a pandemically-induced empty football stadium.

In an attempt to shift students’ perceptions of having opted for an “Arts” based A level, I riff on about creating “a fair test” and identifying “measures of central tendency”.  I am fully aware, after teaching variations of this investigative language study for over 20 years now, that I need to shock Mark into realising that he will need to find something to count, count it and then report what the count tells him about language and language users.

Don’t worry. I hear your gasps of “you can’t reduce the niceties of language analysis to bean counting” and “where are your socio-linguistic sensibilities?”. We will come to that; especially since AO3 is the weightiest of the three AOs awarded to this study and trades marks for appreciation of contextual factors and meanings.

But Mark needs to understand this isn’t an essay; it isn’t a commentary; and it certainly isn’t a report. It is however a precursive experience to a university dissertation.

Assumptions challenged, the next pitfall is approach. There are two processes which students must engage in: conducting an investigation and writing about it.  These processes exist in a chicken and egg symbiosis. Do I teach one and assume the other will follow? If they don’t know how the writing will be structured, how can they cover all the bases when they launch themselves into investigating? If they haven’t assembled data and identified variables, how can they formulate a hypothesis? I tend towards spinning both plates at once, knowing that different students will develop their understanding of these processes in different ways.

And what to investigate? I advise students to go with what they know and enjoy. After all, they will be engaging with the material for several months: that’s a prison sentence if your teacher has foisted an idea onto you just because your initial reaction was “I don’t know what to investigate”.  So, will it be editorials in Horse and Hounds magazines? Perhaps you’ve noticed that sports commentaries on radio stations are more effusive than TV commentators. Your swimming coach has a different way of addressing the team competitors whether you are winning or losing. You’ve noticed that your young female cousin is learning to read faster than your little brother. You suspect that the talk on reality TV shows featuring young people doesn’t match what you have been told about 20th century theories of genderlect. 

However, I draw the lines at poetry and advertising slogans. Not because there isn’t anything to be discovered in these texts: there most certainly is. But you’ve got to write 2000 words covering at least two language levels (or systematic frameworks in old money) and “Guinness is good for you” repeated over the decades with different images of Toucans can only get you so far. Similarly, there is a post grad thesis to be had looking at the implicature of e e cummings dispensing with capitals, but not a successful A level NEA.

There’s always one, though. However much you encourage them to tell you about their latest loot box disappointment, their bilingual grandmother, or their moonlighting gig shelf-stacking on Fridays when they should be attending PSHE lessons, they will still succumb to the lure of an investigation into the comparison of tabloid and broadsheet newspapers. They don’t see any downside to this choice, even when they admit that they don’t read newspapers, and can you just remind them why the Guardian is a broadsheet anyway.

What have I learned over twenty years? A wise colleague transformed my teaching, and students’ outcomes, when she pointed out that moving from a general hypothesis to a detailed analysis was a bit of a stretch for the investigator and the reader.  So, the Queen’s Christmas broadcasts have become more informal during her 68-year reign, but what exactly will you look for to support this hunch? This is where a series of language level-based expectations come in. In terms of lexis, there will be fewer Latinate words now than there were in 1952.  There will be more colloquialisms in 2020 than ever before. And that use of first-person pronouns, unique to royalty (and Margaret Thatcher), might also have changed semantically. These organised, structured, and coded expectations then become the organising framework and structure for the analysis section. Everything is now set up clearly for the investigator to investigate and the reader to read.

Ideally you would start the investigation at the end of the two-year course. This would allow students to reference theories and theorists which they have already studied in Language and Gender, Child Language Acquisition, power, change, diversity etc. But this isn’t practical, so you’re faced with signposting students to ideas and concepts which they don’t yet know are relevant to their investigation. At this stage you are grateful that, although you don’t know much about anything, you do know a little about everything.  There is one theory, however, I discovered that you can bank on to bolster most investigations. One panacea theory; one magic bullet. That is the F Score. 

It’s great. It assigns numerical value to word classes based on whether the word class is deemed to be more formal or more informal. So, adjectives are more formal whilst adverbs are more informal. Students look at their data samples, identify the word classes being used, and apply a formula: [F = (noun frequency + adjective freq. + preposition freq. + article freq. – pronoun freq. – verb freq. – adverb freq. – interjection freq. + 100)/2]. Now they have a number for the degree of formality of each data set. We are talking charts, graphs, means, modes, medians, trendlines….. At this stage Mark wishes he had paid attention in GCSE maths. His classmate Sophie did pay attention though and, having analysed a sample of 6 editions of The Aberdeen Press and Journal over 220 years, she has a wealth of statistical analysis about the formality of language.

Even Mark can now see how he could measure the spoken formality of his favourite sports stars:

At this stage you throw in the curve ball. “Well done, Mark. Now which of your subjects are monolingual?”  Now you’re sold on this universal remedy, I would love to claim ©dchew, but I can’t. Instead get the full monty here.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not an English teacher simply because the Maths department wouldn’t have me. I don’t think that there is beauty in numbers alone; but they do have their place when your student’s investigation needs some close comparative analysis and some marks for AO1 and AO2.

Context really is everything, though. Once you have counted those Latinate derivations, those run of the mill colloquialisms, and “did she mean ‘we’ as a singular or a plural”, you need the context. Why was the 1992 Christmas message an anomaly in the bar chart representation of the Queen’s increasing informalisation? Perhaps because saying “annus horribilis” ad infinitum takes the Latinate lexis count sky high for that year!  When those reality TV shows go out after the watershed and editorialise the hours of recorded talk to 45 minutes of the most dramatic dialogues between two self-serving egotists, then perhaps you really do need to consider the Observer’s Paradox. When you have squeezed the pips out of the numbers, you need to recognise that the F score won’t tell you about semantics, production, reception, representation and variables.

Ah, variables. To keep them open or closed? If Mark is comparing female and male language use (go with me on binary for now), he needs data sets from each group. But if he is going to attempt to ascribe any causal links to his findings, then all the other factors in the data set such as age and audience and familiarity and function had better be the same. Every year I find myself trying to explain the implications of correlation and causality to students who would have preferred media studies on their GCSE timetable to pipettes and Van der Graaf generators. I have honed it down to this example which I tell students every year. “I have looked at the latest test results for this class and I have to say I am pleased that on the whole the boys did better than the girls in the class. So, girls, since all the boys wear ties and none of you wear ties, I suggest that you start wearing a tie if you want to be as good as the boys in the next test.” 

Four months into the investigation you overhear Mark telling his classmate that trendlines only really work for comparing data sets over time. He then points out that using mode rather than mean would allow the anomalous data set to be included without skewing the results. He berates his friend for ignoring audience demographics and begins to explain synthetic personalisation. You sit back and smile. Your work here is done. The groans which filled that pandemically-induced empty football stadium are no more. 

 

Using the Lexis podcast to inspire Language Investigations

Here's a thread I did on Twitter about how you might want to use the Lexis podcast to help with your NEA Language Investigations.

It's that time of year again when students are starting to work on NEA language investigations. We've covered some areas on @LexisPodcast that I think would be good for investigations, so here are a few ideas.

You’ll need to think carefully about how to formulate your own aims and research questions (IMO that’s more important than a title), where your data is going to come from and how you are going to analyse it, but these topics might appeal…

Back in episode 2, we looked at the language of & about protests. There’s been a summer of protest – BLM, ‘statue defenders’, anti-maskers, Extinction Rebellion, antifa facing down fascist militias – so plenty of data to explore.

You could look at the reporting of protests in the media, the language of the protesters themselves (Lisa looked at BLM placards and slogans in that episode), the representation of different sides, including the police.

In episodes 1 and 2, we talked about accents & accentism. More widely, there have been debates among teachers and educators about standard & non-standard English in schools. Why not look at the ways in which certain accents & dialects are represented?

That could be through news stories about varieties of English or by analysing the language used in accent reduction advertisements, YouTube channels or comments online. We interviewed Rob Drummond, Devyani Sharma and Ian Cushing about these topics.

Language policing and censorship have been issues we’ve come back to a few times. Whether it’s racially offensive terms or people choosing their own pronouns (and the backlash against that), language debates are always in the news.

The ways in which these are reported & commented on can make really good investigations. You could employ critical discourse approaches to explore how different arguments are put forward & how language itself is represented.

But also, you could look at how language changes over time. By selecting some texts from different time periods (social media messages, media texts, letters) you could explore the changing frequency of taboo terms and their alternatives.

Tony Thorne was our interviewee in episode 9 and we had a great chat with him about the language of the pandemic. You might have had enough of this by now – I know most of us have – but there’s masses of data out there to analyse…

How the pandemic has been represented over its lifespan, how key politicians and scientists have spoken about it to the public, how different social and ethnic groups have been scapegoated. I could go on, but I’ll just get angry & depressed.

But there’s so much you could look at around the framing of the whole issue, the slogans used, the reporting of the language even. Tony had some excellent stuff to say about covid vocabulary and it wasn’t as depressing as you might think!

In episode 7 we talked to Philip Seargeant about emojis. How are these used in different messaging and social media apps? Is there a notable difference between age groups? Who uses them more or less and for what ends?

Kelly Wright’s work on the representation of race and ethnicity in sports journalism sparked some interesting discussion in episode 6 and we spoke to her at about the same time as a PFA report on representation of footballers was published.

This is a fascinating area to investigate and there’s great scope for you to build your own mini-corpus and explore the language of representation here, whether it’s with a focus on the terms used to describe black athletes compared to white…

how women are represented compared to men, how Paralympians compare to able-bodied athletes… there’s a lot to think about. Gathering data, selecting a database for your own mini-corpus analysis, exploring key words & their meanings, can all be productive.

We focused on accent change in our Northern accents special in episode 8 and talked to Georgina Brown about new research about (maybe) new accents. So often, accents are linked to prestige and social expectations, so could this be a focus?

You could look at particular sounds, think about how they are used by different speakers in different social situations and think about their social meanings. Accent studies at A level can be trickier than others, but there’s scope for a good investigation if you think carefully.

In episodes 3, 4 and 10 we’ve talked a lot with Devyani Sharma, Shivonne Gates and Lucy Jones about language variation and identity. You could take any of the work they talked about – their own research or studies they’ve mentioned – as a useful starting point.

MLE, language performing different social identities and questions about how we change our language in different contexts can all lead to studies where you collect your own data and offer your own questions.

That’s enough to be going on with for now… If you have any other ideas, based on what we’ve done so far, let us know!

NEA support: genre and the original writing commentary

If you are still working on your NEA original writing commentary, or just polishing it up for submission, here are a few bits of advice.

We covered the NEA commentary a while ago here on the blog, but there are a few other things I'd add to that, having seen hundreds and hundreds of folders since then.

Think carefully about the genre of your style model and your own piece. Genre is the key to doing well on AO2 and is often - according to the Lead Moderator's report - one of those areas often not done very well. What does 'genre' involve? It's basically about the kind of text you're writing, how you might classify its type. But as with any classification, there will be some texts that fit really neatly into a genre, others that seem to straddle genres and others that are harder to pin down.

Daniel Chandler, a media and visual arts theorist, talks about a traditional view of genre in An Introduction to Genre Theory:

For the purposes of your English Language work, I'd argue that these - theme, setting, structure and style - are all very relevant, but that it's perhaps structure we see done less well at the very top end. While the content side of things is often quite well-handled (think of thrillers, ghost stories, dystopian fiction etc and you'll have a pretty instinctive grasp of what is going to appear in them), it's the form side of things we don't see done as well. 

So, have a think about this in relation to the two texts you're looking at (the style model and your own piece). Which structural elements are linked to the genre? How are they important? 

An example. You're writing a dramatic monologue to be performed on stage or in front of a camera. The structural elements of the narrative might be deliberately designed to delay key information about the narrator's character: that's a key structural aspect of this genre. 

However, it's also worth bearing in mind that genre isn't always that simple. As Chandler goes on to point out: 

So, you can manipulate and experiment with genre, and that's what I think the mark scheme is driving at in the descriptor in Level 5 for AO2 of 'demonstrate understanding of genre as a dynamic process'. Some kind of understanding that what you have written (and even perhaps, the choices made in your style model) as being more than just a tick-list of features to add, but a set of choices that writers make for all sorts of reasons seems to me to be a good way to show evidence of this descriptor. 

On a simple level, you might argue that being able to identify the features of a genre and then use them is one kind of skill, but it's another level of skill to be able to understand the nature of the genre and explore it, test its limits and even mix it with another. If you can combine this with a discussion of the language you've used and the representation and effects you've intended to create, then it could form a good blend of AO1, 2 and 3. Talk about both texts together and offer a clearly written line of argument, and you're doing all 5 AOs well. 

So, if you're still working on your commentary, give this some thought and if the idea appeals, have a bit more of a read of Chandler's ideas about genre and see what you make of them.

Investigating Language - ideas for projects

As I'm currently holed up in my marking bunker with only a red pen, a bag of Monster Munch and a 2L bottle of Diet Coke, I've not got time for a full blog post on the NEA Language Investigation, but here's a thread on Twitter where teachers talk about some of their favourite and most interesting NEA projects of recent years. See what you think.

Thanks to everyone for the excellent ideas in this thread. This would be a brilliant starting point for anyone thinking about #EngLang NEA investigations this year. https://t.co/ZMhm7ace1k

— EngLangBlog (@EngLangBlog) July 6, 2018

The long view (part 2)

As a follow-up to the last blog, a couple of other things that you can do as part of a longer term approach to success in A level English Language are covered below.

Get used to different kinds of data
If you're new to the course, you'll be surprised to find that parts of it are a bit more like Psychology and Sociology A level than you might have expected. Ok, we have the textual analysis that I talked about last week and the discussions around how people feel about language use, but you'll also need to get to grips with what linguists have researched and get used to the methodologies involved in language study.

What does this mean in practice? Well, you might be given something like the data below in class and asked to interpret it. What would you do with it and what does it tell you?

Have a think about what's being measured here: "H-dropping" is on the y-axis, a phonological process that many of us use when we leave the /h/ sound off words like house, half or Harry Redknapp. What does the graph tell us about this feature? It tells us that in studies carried out in Bradford (Malcolm Petyt 1985) and Norwich (Peter Trudgill 1974), the further down the social class ladder you go (x-axis: 1 highest class and 5 lowest), the more h-dropping there is and that this feature varies in the two locations, with Yorkshire generally seeing more h-dropping across all social classes than Norfolk.
There's more you could look at here, such as why 17% of even the highest social class in Bradford drop the /h/ or why there's such a big leap between social classes 2 and 3 in both areas, and 4 to 5 in Yorkshire.

There's also a lot it doesn't tell us. How was the data collected? Were women and men interviewed and what results did they give? What about age groups? Are younger people more or less likely to h-drop? Is ethnic background a factor - Bradford being a much more multicultural city than Norwich?

And then there's the whole discussion around why this happens and what it might reveal about the links between language and society. There's plenty of other data you'll come across too, not all of it looking like this. You'll see plenty of this in work you'll do for paper 2.

Keep up to date with linguistic research

While the studies above were done well over 30-40 years ago, linguistic research is happening all the time. When we put this book together, we tried to cover some classic studies but also offer more recent developments in each field, so students and teachers could see what had been going on and how the thinking in each area had been developing. 

You can keep up to date with the very latest material from the excellent Linguistics Research Digest run from QMUL. They read through the (often heavy-going) linguistics journals and then present the research in a more student-friendly form. It's really useful and offers you some of the most up-to-date material you can find.

Lots of excellent linguists such as Deborah Cameron, Rob Drummond, Lynne Murphy, Jenny Lewin-Jones and Tim Grant are active on Twitter and write blogs and articles themselves, so these are highly recommended:

• Deborah Cameron's blog - great on gender and language mainly, but just a great read.
• Lynne Murphy's blog - excellent on US and UK English. 
• Tim Grant's blog - forensic linguistics is a real eye-opener
• Jenny Lewin-Jones on Twitter - always tweeting really good stuff
• Rob Drummond on Twitter - lots on accents, youth speech and attitudes to language

Keep a language scrapbook

There's so much going on to with English all the time that it can be hard to keep up. I'd recommend getting on Twitter and following some of the linguists, English teachers, English departments and journalists that are regularly retweeted by the EngLangBlog account, but also try to keep a record of the articles, the research and the weird language phenomena that you encounter. 

All of these can be great to feed into class discussions and exam answers or even as potential NEA investigation topics (when you get to that). Keep your eyes and ears open and you'll enjoy the course more and build up a better understanding of it all as it goes on.

Next time... some ideas about why study of the darker side of language - sexism, abuse, racism, trolling and the like - is something not to shy away from.

NEA Commentary

As part of the Original Writing section of the NEA, students will be required to produce a commentary on their piece. This blog post will provide some guidance on completing the commentary for the NEA and useful tips.

What is the commentary? 

The commentary is designed to enable you to explain the decisions you have made in writing your piece and the language levels that you have employed and replicated following your exploration of a style model. 

Word Count

The commentary is just as important as the Original Writing piece in that it is also 750 words and the same number of marks (25). 

Assessment Objectives 

This piece will test your ability to employ all of the assessment objectives equally. Below is a screenshot from the criteria on the top band features: 

What does this mean? 

A01: You need to use a range of language levels. Note the key words ‘integrated’ and ‘connected.’

Regardless of the language levels used, aim to cover a range rather than repeating multiple times the use of a particular word class. Do not write about the language levels in a disjointed fashion. You will do better by integrating them, e.g. The attributive adjective “gold” within the noun phrase “the gold surface.” 

A02: Through your knowledge gained from the style model, you will need to demonstrate an awareness of genre. How does your original writing imitate the genre? How have you shown understanding of how individual genres work (and possibly overlap)?

A03: You need to engage in the way language is used to create meanings and representations. Think about how the language levels are used to create different effects.

A04: Within your commentary, you must make reference to the style model. An integrated comparison between the style model and original writing piece is needed.

A05: Throughout the entire piece, you will be assessed on your ability to express ideas clearly and carefully using an effective structure. Note the key word “guide.” You need to provide a clear analysis that is well organised rather than a disjointed piece of work that lacks coherence.

Getting the process started

In order to produce a successful commentary, you should complete the following:

1. As part of your planning for the Original Writing, you will have have selected a style model and looked at the linguistic strategies that it uses. In order to write a successful commentary, analyse the language levels used in your style model. Highlight them in different colours, e.g. red = syntax, green = word classes. This is a really important starting point as you need to make connections (A04) to your style model. Your commentary cannot just write about your own Original Writing piece as you need to justify how they relate to your selected style model.

2. After analysing your style model in detail, you need to then identify the language levels used within your own work. Think about why they have been used. 

• What representation did you intend to create? 
• What purpose does the language level that you have employed serve?
• Ensure that you make a comments on the way the audience, writer and subjected are positioned along the way.
• When you are analysing your work, it is important to consider a range of language levels. Avoid just focusing on the ones you feel most confident with using. A good spread of language levels that are appropriate and meaningful to justifying your ideas is better than repeating the same ones constantly. 

Beginning the Commentary 

As part of your A Level course so far, you will be familiar with the importance of context and how this shapes the meaning and production of the texts. When producing your commentary, your opening paragraph should contextualise your Original Writing piece and making a clear connection to your style model. Consider the following as part of your opening paragraph: 

• You need to contextualise your own piece of work. Ensure that you comment on the purpose, form, topic, audience and how the subject is being represented. Do not generalise here. You need to be very specific. Generalisations will not help you reach high marks.
• You also need to introduce your style model. Why have you selected it? How does it relate to your own original writing piece? 

Example:

"My style model is in the genre of a dramatic monologue. There are different sections in the text with scene changes indicated by 'Go to Black' or 'Fade.' The monologue explores a character who is not fully self-aware and I have reflected this in my Original Writing piece... My monologue is similar to Bennett's in many ways, whilst also having differences..."  

Main Paragraphs in the Commentary

After establishing the context of both your own original writing piece and your style model, you then need to carefully analyse the language levels employed in your own work.

• Remember that you need to integrate linguistic description where possible, e.g. The pre-modifying attributive adjective ‘gold’ used within the noun phrase ‘the gold star’ is used to represent it as ….
• Once you have commented on your own piece of work, you then need to make sure that you make connections to the style model. It might also be the case that there are marked differences in how you have used the language levels. This is equally acceptable but you need to explain why, as this will enable you to discuss contextual factors shaping the production.
• Remember that you need to engage in meanings. Think about the way the linguistic strategies and language levels used create a representation.
• Adopt an interwoven comparison throughout rather than writing about the style model and your own production piece in isolation.
• Referring to the assessment criteria, you will note that it asks you to ‘guide’ the reader through. You will need to develop a coherent line of thought here. In order to guarantee this, you need to avoid leading with A01 features and instead developing topic sentences that enable the reader to understand the connections and points of comparisons being made. 
• Both the style model and original writing piece employ … but to create different representations…
• Within the style model, it utilises … which has been imitated in my original writing piece to …
• Throughout the style model there is use of …. This is mirrored in my original writing piece … so that the subject of … is represented …
• Whilst the style model utilises …. To represent the subject as … I have employed them in a different way so that the topic can be represented as … 
• Ensure that you refer closely to your style model by quoting specific examples from it. Likewise, you will need to do the same with your own original writing piece. If you provide no evidence, credit for A01 features cannot be given regardless of how vast a range of features you have employed. 

Example: 

"As monologues are spoken, it is important to represent speech. Bennett employs ellipsis to make it sound spontaneous and realistic. For example, Marjory says 'Said it was Rawdon anyway." This has been imitated in my own original writing piece through..." 

Concluding the Commentary 

This does not need to be a lengthy part of the piece. A couple of sentences will do here. Your concluding paragraph should very succinctly summarise the overall representation that you have created in your original writing piece.

• Overall, my original writing piece employs a range of language levels that are similar to my style model to represent the subject as … 

Useful Phrases: 

• Emulate / Mirror / Employ / Reflected / Imitated / Utilised / Mimics / Aligns /
• Represents / Portrays / Illustrates / Illuminates / Conveys
• The audience are positioned / This positions the audience to …
• Both / Equally / Similarly / In the same way / Using the style model, I have …
• Whereas / In contrast / Unlike / Alternatively / On the other hand

Good luck with completing your commentary for the NEA and I hope this has helped. 

Tackling the NEA Language Investigation

As lots of students are embarking on the Language Investigation part of the Non-Exam Assessment, I thought it might be handy to pick up a few points which I think will be important. The Language Investigation is unlike anything you have done before (unless you've done an EPQ) and it's not an essay or an analysis, but probably the closest thing to a university dissertation that you will do at this level. What does a Language Investigation involve? Read this.

Think of a manageable project... 
Your aim is to write up an investigation of around 2000 words (excluding data) so your project has to be manageable. You can't ask huge questions about language or try to prove or disprove an established theory about language use. Big ideas aren't a problem - and we'd encourage you to think big on most of this course - but in a language investigation you will need to pinpoint your questions and be really specific. You also need to be able to collect your data in a fairly short space of time. If you are planning something too ambitious and time-consuming, it will be hard to do it.

...on a topic that you are interested in
If you aren't interested in what you are investigating, it will be hard to stick to it. You will probably have the best part of 6-8 weeks to work on this project from beginning to end so it has to be something that floats your boat. If you can't think of an interesting project of your own, check the list here or the ideas here. Ideally, the topic should be something that you feel you can invest a bit of time and energy in. Is there an area of the course so far that you've found particularly interesting? Is there something you do outside college - playing/coaching a sport, online gaming, working, reading a certain genre of books/graphic novels/magazines, TV/films that you are obsessed with - that you can investigate linguistically? Some of the very best investigations come from things that students are really interested in.

Read around your topic
You should aim to find out as much as you can about the area you are investigating. Who has researched in this field before? What studies have been carried out? Are there any approaches or methodologies that you can learn from? Use the textbooks, student handbooks and emagazine archive for ideas.

Narrow down your research questions and think of realistic aims and/or hypothesis
You might start with a fairly broad question that you want to answer. It could be something like one of the ones below:

• How do women and men use language differently in certain situations?
• How do children of different ages show different levels of language ability?
• How does the language of a certain kind of advertising change over time?
• How is immigration represented in different newspapers?
• What language devices are used by people when communicating via social media?

Each of these is fine as a starting point, but they all need refining. So, think of some of the following to help you break them down further:

• What do you mean by language? Which frameworks/language levels will you analyse? Will your focus be on lexis & semantics, syntax & morphology, phonology, pragmatics, discourse structure, graphology, interactional features, or a mixture of these? Will it be specific features of language within these headings, such as adjective use, tag questions, hedging, narrative structures etc? Think carefully about defining what you mean by language. We will probably need to see both depth and range to award the highest marks.
• Which people? You can't make blanket generalisations about women and men, boys and girls, young and old, so think carefully about whose language you might want to explore. If you set out to 'prove' that women do x and men do y, you'll probably come unstuck because different people behave very differently in different situations. Be aware of this and be tentative and exploratory in your approach.
• Which texts and which times? Think very carefully about the texts that you select. Why are you choosing these texts to analyse? What's your rationale for looking at (say) advertising of hair care products for women rather than shirts for men? What do you expect to change in the language used to advertise them and why might this be happening? Which time periods are you going to select and why? Do you expect major changes to have taken place over 20 years? It's possible with some products, but a longer time frame might give you more to work with.
• Which newspapers? Which sections of them? From which times? What kinds of immigration? Don't assume that all papers have consistent lines on these issues. Some of them will argue different positions on the same day, depending on who is writing the piece. Think about delving into older, archived articles; there are loads of really interesting ones online and they might give you some useful reference points. How will you explore the idea of representation and what it means? Will this mean that particular frameworks are more useful than others?
• Which people and which forms of social media? Twitter is not the same as Facebook and web forums are very different to Instagram. Narrow it down and think about what it is you want to explore.

Look at the sample investigations

If you don't know what a good investigation looks like, you will have no idea what you are aiming for. Your teacher will either have provided you with some of these or have access to them. Make sure that you look at them and understand how they have been put together and what you are expected to do.

Think carefully about your data selection

Don't just collect everything and hope to analyse it all. Select the most useful data and explain that selection in your methodology. That doesn't mean that you select the data to fit a preconceived idea of what you will find, but that you consider carefully how much data you need, what type and the context of that data. Think about how you might present your data as well; can you put it in a table, chart or list to make it clearer? If you are transcribing it, how will you show things like overlap, interruption and emphatic stress? Look at this example on the AQA website for an example of what to do and how to approach the first few sections. It's not perfect (it wasn't a final draft) but it is pretty clear. The data selection, in particular, is really effective.

Analyse your data thoroughly

Close focus on both AO1 and AO3 is vital in producing a strong analysis. You need to apply relevant language frameworks (the ones you decided on when you set up your research questions) but you also need to consider meanings, representations and contexts. Don't just pluck single words or phrases from out of their contexts to analyse in isolation: show us where the language comes from and what it means in its context. Think about how it works and what it does. You should also be able to apply your understanding of AO2 language concepts and theories to the analysis you are carrying out.

If you see an example in your data of language being used in ways that fits with, or contradicts, ideas you've seen before about what people do with language, explore this. For example, if research into male language suggests that men "construct solidarity through verbal jousting" - or what we might call 'banter' (urgh!) these days - (Coates, 2003) but you see women doing this in your data, think about why that might be.

Equally, if media articles about texting tell you that young people frequently abbreviate and use non-standard English in their messages, but you find that only 5% of words are shortened in your data set, think about why this might be. Are the articles wrong? They might be. But what has happened to messaging in the last few years and how is the technology different?

If you carry out a survey into the ways in which different regional varieties are represented and find that a dialect judged as being prestigious 30 years ago is now seen (in your analysis, at least) as being less respected, why might this be? Think about the possible reasons for your findings being different? Have attitudes shifted? Is your methodology different to that which was used in the 1980s?

These are all things to think through and consider.

Evaluate throughout

You don't need to write an evaluation at the end of your project, but you are expected to evaluate what you are doing as you go along. Reflect on your methodology: is it a good way to explore your data? Can you think of other ways to do it? What does your data analysis tell you? Can you evaluate what your data reveals about the questions you have been asking?

Make sure your first draft is a substantial, serious piece of work

You do get a chance to redraft but the feedback your teachers are allowed to give is limited. We can't give you a mark for a first draft. We can't offer detailed advice about how to improve what you've done. We can give you the mark scheme and let you decide what you are doing and where you might be able to improve things, but it's vital that your first draft isn't a half-finished, will-this-do, sketchy effort. 

Get going on it quickly

Don't sit around and procrastinate, waiting for your teacher to give you an idea. Think of something you can do and get on with doing it. Once you've got some ideas, we can help you shape them and show you where you need to go. The worst investigations are inevitably the ones where students can't decide what they want to do, have no real interest in it and/or don't really know what they are doing. 

NEA: investigation ideas part 1

In this, the 1000th post on EngLangBlog (OMG), I'll run through a couple of quick ideas for language investigations based on recent stories in the news or language posts elsewhere.

1. Changing UK accents and dialects. 
The stories in the press and on the radio last week about the Sound of 2066 report were fascinating and worrying in equal measure. The report itself can be downloaded here and is a really good read (and very useful for anyone studying Change and Diversity for the new A level course). It looks at what English might look and sound like in 50 years and traces some patterns that have already been established - abbreviations, borrowing and simplification of sounds - to see what is likely to occur as time goes on.
Here's a nice clip of the report's authors talking about their predictions.
There are several language investigations in there, I think. One might be to consider one or two variables in your own family and the ways in which these might have changed across generations. Another might be to look at these changes in written texts over time: abbreviations cold be a good one as we have used them for a long time (e.g. etc. et al. & err... etc.) but many see them as a recent development.

Another set of investigations (which crosses over with Paper 2 Language Discourses work) would be to examine the coverage of the report. As I (no doubt, tediously) complained about on Twitter last week, the angles taken by various right wing news outlets, were worryingly xenophobic and played on anti-immigration themes. You can make your own mind up about these by looking at the headlines and main thrust of each of the following. Notice a pattern?

Telegraph
Mail (original headline published for this was "Is immigration killing off the Queen's English?"
The Sun
The Guardian

The local media coverage of stories like this is also good to consider. Here's what three regional publications made of it all:

Newcastle
Birmingham
Liverpool

2. Changing attitudes to taboo language
This one has always been a favourite  because it allows you to look at really bad swear words in an academic and mature way ("Ha, that says boobies!"). Every few years, Ofcom publishes a survey of social attitudes to swearing and their latest report can be found here. Looking back at their previous reports (check this blog), you can see some shifting social attitudes towards certain words.

Is this something you could do for your own investigation? An apparent time study (using an age-stratified sample of respondents) might allow you to test how people feel about different swear words and explore some of their reasons for finding them offensive or otherwise. There's plenty of scope for discussion about taboos around various bodily functions, sex and social behaviour, but also a lot of scope for discussion of religion, gender, race and sexuality, all of which feed into other parts of this course.

This article and this one are helpful for providing other angles.

More ideas next week, but if you have any of your own, please tweet them to @EngLangBlog.

Welcome to 'NEA', the component formerly known as 'coursework'

One of the new things in the A level, as opposed to the AS level, is the appearance of coursework. Except we're not supposed to call it 'coursework' any more and that's probably got something to do with political arguments about the validity of internally-assessed work in a high-stakes testing regime...but I'll save that discussion for another day and maybe some bright spark out there could do a language investigation into the semantic pejoration of the term 'coursework' in media discourses around education.

But anyway, here's a thing I've put together for our returning AS students, now embarking on the 2nd year of the A level course. It's not a complete explanation of what's involved in the Non-Exam Assessment (NEA) but sets a few starting points and offers some ideas for what you can do before you really get started.

We're not officially starting our NEA work until nearer Christmas (and just to mention Christmas seems obscene at this time of year!) but we'd like students to think ahead a bit and get some ideas ticking over.

You can find plenty of other ideas about language investigations from the blog here.

As part of the second year of your A level course, you will have two exam components and one that is called Non-Exam Assessment (i.e. coursework).

The aim of NEA component is to allow you to explore and analyse language data independently and develop and reflect upon your own writing expertise.

It requires you to carry out two different kinds of individual research:
– a language investigation (2,000 words excluding data)
– a piece of original writing and commentary (750 words each)

Language Investigation 

A project that involves you researching and investigating an area of language, setting your own questions, collecting your own data and then analysing your data and writing it all up. It’s not quite like anything you will have done before for English and requires a good chunk of time, some clear understanding of how language works and - perhaps, most importantly -  your own initiative. You will get more detailed information about the investigation as the term goes on, but will find it helpful to think about potential investigation topics as you look back at work from last year and develop your understanding of new topic areas this year.

A Language Investigation might look something like one of the examples below – which are based on topics you cover on the course – but could equally be about something we do not do on the course. As long as there is a language element to it and you can convince your teacher that it is a viable project, you can do it.

Example investigations

1. A study of the language techniques used by Great British Bake-Off judges when commenting on the cakes produced in the final rounds of the competition, focusing on politeness, directness and possible gender differences.
2. An investigation into the language of female boxers during interviews to see if stereotypes about female communication are true for these women.
3. A comparison of the language used by three children of different ages when responding to the same task, focusing particularly on the stages of development they are at and their ability to use vocabulary and grammar.
4. An investigation into the ways in which different political parties and pressure groups represented the EU during the 2016 referendum across their campaign literature.
5. A study of ways in which local newspapers in 3 different areas represent their local dialect and accent in reports about varieties of English.
6. A comparison of how Maybelline adverts change over a 75-year period in their representation of female beauty.
7. An investigation into the messaging styles of 3 different age groups when using WhatsApp.
8. An investigation into the ways that the language of Twitter arguments differs from those carried out face to face.
9. An exploration of the different language techniques used by three supermarkets to represent their values to the general public on their official websites.
10. A study of the linguistic techniques used by rugby commentators in a radio commentary compared to an online commentary from the BBC website.

This is not an exhaustive list and there are endless possibilities to explore, but you should be able to see that some of these link to areas you might already have studied, while others pick up on A level-only topics.

What you can do now

• Think about potential language investigation topics (and possible methodologies i.e. how you might approach the topic) as this first term goes on
• Start collecting data: saving articles, bookmarking links, making a note of interesting radio, TV or online shows
• Start discussing ideas with your teacher
• Read the material in your A level handbook (and in the OUP or CUP course textbooks) for ideas about how to approach the NEA

Original Writing

You will need to produce one piece of original writing based on one of the following three areas:
• the power of persuasion
• the power of storytelling
• the power of information

The topic choice is down to you (in discussion with your teacher) but you must have looked at a range of style models and chosen one to comment on in more detail as part of your commentary. Again, you will do some of this in class, but it is a good idea to think about the kind of thing you can write and might enjoy doing. Some suggestions for original writing tasks might be:

The power of persuasion
• A piece of investigative journalism.
• A speech delivered on a controversial topic.
• A letter to an MP.

The power of storytelling
• A short story.
• An extract from a biography.
• A dramatic monologue.

The power of information
• A piece of travel journalism.
• A blog focusing on social issues.
• A piece of local history.

Each folder submitted should contain:
• a piece of original writing
• an annotated style model
• a reflective commentary references (paper and web-based)

What you can do now

Read and write. Find stories, articles and speeches to read. Practise writing in different styles. Use the time in class for Directed Writing tasks as part of the exam components to experiment with form, style and voice. This is one of the few areas on any A level that allows you to write what you like.