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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

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 ...

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 ...

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 s...

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 acro...

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 ti...