What makes a good investigation?

• Choosing a topic that interests you and which you will be prepared to invest time and energy in
• Defining a manageable and do-able task
• Choosing a topic which plays to your strengths
• Keeping to deadlines and keeping up with the work so that it is not rushed
• Making use of the teacher's supervisory role

Choosing an Investigation

The first stage is for you to think about basic ideas and discuss what you want to do with your English tutor. This is to help define a suitable task and help identify sources and methods of work. They will help check the feasibility of data collection and what you want to find out about it and the approaches you might take.

Choosing the topic

First of all you must choose which of subject areas on the left you wish to study. This is vital. You are going to be living with this investigation for some time so it's important that you decide carefully which of the prescribed areas to focus on. You will have the opportunity to play to your strengths, to choose a topic that complements your other A-Levels or to choose an area you've never looked at before.

Using your own resources

Good investigations often come out of your own resources. Do you have a collection of letters from a pen pal whose English isn't perfect? Have you got relatives with a regional dialect and accent? Would you like to look at the changing language in the comic collection started by your dad? Are your grandfather's letters home during the war a possible source of data?

Using the course

Another way of gaining ideas is to review what has been done on the course so far. You might want to look at whether men use colour terms differently from women as Lakoff suggests. Or you might want to explore whether different programmes on television are subtitled in different ways, having looked at spoken and written varieties of English.

Sample Investigations

There is a very good set of activities in Researching Language by Angela Goddard (see link on the right) which offers small pieces of data and questions what issues you might raise and what frameworks you would use to investigate them further. This can help stimulate ideas and gets you thinking about the selection of appropriate frameworks.

Possible titles

Sophie's Desk has a list of possible investigation titles, some of which may interest you as possible study areas. However this list is not exhaustive, you are free to invent your own question or take a different angle. The only rule is that you stick to one of the presribed areas as set out by the WJEC exam board.

Sequence of work

Outlined below is a suggested sequence of work that you might undertake for this coursework module.

Stage 1 : Introduction

• Asking questions/selecting frameworks
• Generating ideas
• Assorted data samples
• Example investigations

Stage 2:  Making proposals

• Selecting a focus     
• Clarifying aims and
• Defining methodology

Stage 3: Data Collection

Stage 4: Analysing the data

Stage 5: Drawing Conclusions

Stage 6: Evaluation

• evaluating the methodology
• conclusions
• suggestions for further study

Stage 7: Final presentation of investigation report