OCR English Language A Level - NEA: Investigating Language Research - Finding a Topic

These materials start the students on their route to finding an investigation that suits them best for their NEA (worth 20% of the marks for the A Level). The materials were originally used within 2 x 90 minute lessons in order to prompt initial individual tutorials with the teacher.

In our centre, we start the NEA in the last half term before the summer holidays once AS (or internal) exams are complete, aiming for the students to explore the feasibility of their top 3 ideas within the half term before settling on their preferred research investigation. Once this is approved by the teacher, we ask students to gather most of their data by the end of the summer term.

This package includes a spreadsheet of all investigations done (and approved by OCR) by students over 5 years at one centre which may be very useful if your centre is new to teaching the syllabus and your students do not have access to work done by previous students. The list is not exhaustive and the investigations described are not intended to be replicated but merely to show the range of data that can be investigated and possible research focuses.

This package includes the following:

1. Booklet (Word) - Finding a topic
2. Powerpoint - Finding a topic - reviewing past projects
3. Excel spreadsheet containing a list of 138 investigations organised by power, gender, technology, representation and ‘other’
4. Powerpoint - Focus for independent work and tutorials with teacher

More resources to help with the NEA
Another small package (also on TES) called “Research Methods for Investigations” can be used as an additional starter (one 90 minute lesson) for the NEA investigation work (to be used before this series of lessons).

Additional notes:
A nice initial introductory exercise (not included with these resources) is to put students into small groups (3 - 4) and give them a bundle (1 per student) of previous years’ investigations that achieved different grades.
Method:

1. Once all students in each group have read all the projects they have been given, ask them to discuss and reach a consensus about a possible rank order and their justifications.
2. Share the marks and comments for the projects with the students and ask the group collaboratively to devise a list of characteristics of “a successful investigation” according to their observations of projects and markers’ comments they have read.
   [NB: To comply with GDPR rules within your own institution, you may wish to remove identification from past projects unless students have given express permission for their work to be shared with future students.]