english language investigation coursework

How to write your A-Level English Language NEA

In A-Level by Think Student Editor September 25, 2024 Leave a Comment

I’m not going to sugar coat it; writing is hard. Especially when it comes to writing you A-Level English Language NEA, where there is writing, writing and even more writing. Plus, the style of writing that you must do in your NEA is often something that you won’t have ever done before at least not to that level.

Having done the A-Level English Language NEA myself (and getting a pretty good mark if I say so myself), I’m here to guide you through the A-Level English writing process and to hopefully make your life a whole lot easier. Without further ado, lets jump into it.

Table of Contents

What are the A-Level English Language NEAs?

The A-Level English Language NEA is incredibly varied, to the extent that I wouldn’t call it just one NEA. While an NEA is a part of all A-Level English Language specifications, the actual NEA you do will greatly depend on the exam board.

At my college, we did the AQA specification, which is the main one. Then there’s also the NEAs for the Pearson Edexcel, OCR and WJEC specifications, which are all fairly different.

As it’s the main A-Level exam board, let’s first have a look at AQA’s A-Level English Language NEA. For AQA, students are required to do two separate pieces of coursework as part of their NEA.

These are the original writing NEA the language investigation NEA. In the original writing NEA, students will need to complete a piece of original writing that is based on a professional piece and then write a commentary comparing these.

For the language investigation, students will need to complete an “investigation” or research into a specific piece of language and then write a report on their findings. For more on this, have a look at this page on the AQA website.

Pearson Edexcel

For Pearson Edexcel, students will need to write two pieces of original writing within the same genre that are different due to either their function or audience. Then, students will need to compare these pieces in a commentary. For more on this, click here to see the specification from Pearson Edexcel.

In the OCR specification, students must carry out an investigation into a specific area of language and then write a report on this. Then, students will also need to create a poster outlining this research in an accessible way. You can learn more about this by having a look at this page on the OCR website.

For WJEC, students will once again need to carry out a language investigation into an area of language, in this case, it must be within a specific category. You can learn more about this by having a look at this page from the WJEC website.

How to write the AQA A-Level English Language Original Writing NEA

In this article, we’ll mainly focus on how to write the AQA NEAs. This is for a few reasons.

First of all, I personally did the AQA specification so I can give you all the info on writing these NEAs from actual experience. Secondly, AQA is the main exam board for A-Level. Thirdly, as the AQA specification has two completely separate NEAs, the other exam boards’ NEAs are quite similar to at least one of them.

Without further ado, let’s get into the actual writing process. While mainly focused on AQA, this section of the article will apply both to the AQA original writing NEA and the Pearson Edexcel NEA.

Please note, the writing below uses information from this page of the AQA website and this page of the Pearson Edexcel website.

Step 1: Come up with your idea for your A-Level English Language NEA

The first thing you need to do for your original writing NEA is to come up with the idea. For AQA, this idea will need to be within in one of 3 categories, and it will need to be based off a “style model”.

These are the power of persuasion, the power of storytelling and the power of information. Ignoring the “power of” bit, these categories are pretty self-explanatory.

There is a wide, wide range of styles that this includes, so it doesn’t actually limit you as much as it may sound. If you’re indecisive like me, you may not find this very helpful.

Don’t worry!

If you need help coming up with an idea of what to do for your A-Level English Language original writing NEA, have a look at this Think Student article which is packed with ideas just for you.

Once you’ve come up with an idea of the genre or style of writing that you’re going for, you will then need to find a “style guide” (for the AQA specification). This style model isn’t supposed to be the exact same as what you’re going to write but it should be a model piece within the genre you’re writing.

For the Pearson Edexcel exam board, you will also need to make sure that your idea works for both pieces, so it can’t be too niche.

Step 2: Analyse your style model for your A-Level English NEA

Once you’ve picked your NEA idea and found a style model, the next thing to do is to analyse this text.

Analysing your style model is an absolute must. First of all, you need to analyse your style model in order to base your own writing off it. This should be done linguistically, you should be identifying the layout and the linguistic features and techniques used (pragmatics, semantics, lexis, etc.), rather than just subbing your own themes into the text.

Also, you will need to analyse your style model to set up for your linguistic commentary that you will need to do once you have completed your own writing. While I’ll go into more detail later on in the article, this commentary is all about comparing your own writing to your style model and the linguistic choices that you made that made it similar or different to your style model.

Due to this, you MUST be aware of the features and the writer’s choices throughout the text.

Moreover, you need to have an annotated style model as a part of the submitted folder for this NEA.

Please note that this step is completely void if you’re following the Pearson Edexcel specification.

Step 3: Start writing your A-Level English Language Original Writing NEA

Once you’ve got that down, it’s time to start writing. How long this takes and how difficult this process will be for you will completely depend on what genre you’ve chosen and how hard you find writing in general.

To get started, I found it helpful to break the entire writing into blocks, so that I would outline these sections and then write them individually. This can also be great for keeping in time with your writing as you can more easily set out to do one section rather than the whole thing or even a set number of words in each sitting.

Luckily, I was able to keep those blocks for my final product as I was writing a travel brochure, so I simply made them into the text boxes across the page. You may also be able to do this if the genre allows, or you could simply put everything back together. If this is the case, you’ll need to make sure that you’ll still retain interconnectivity between sections and strong cohesion.

When writing, you should remember to use as many high level features as you can naturally, such as lexical and semantic patterns, as your own writing is still being assessed. Also, you should try to make note of all the features that you use and the choices you’re making so that you can analyse and evaluate these in your commentary.

For the Pearson Edexcel NEA, your job is a bit harder as you have two pieces to write. You should once again be using as many high level features as you can and still making note of the similarities and differences in technique and your other choices between the texts due to their function/audience.

Step 4: Write the commentary of your A-Level English Language Original Writing NEA

Once you’ve finished writing your original pieces, the first thing you should be doing is giving yourself a pat on the back. Writing in any form is difficult so finishing an entire piece (or two) is an amazing achievement.

After that, it’s time to get on with the commentary. The commentary for your A-Level English Language NEA is in some ways very similar to the comparison questions in both paper 1 and paper for AQA. However, it’s slightly different as you’re comparing your own work with the text you based it off.

In this way, you need to be focusing on the similarities, differences and writer’s choices, both for the other text and your own. You should also be constantly referring back to the genre and its features as well as the category either of persuasion, storytelling and information as a basis.

For the Pearson Edexcel specification, you will just be comparing your two pieces with each other. Once again, you should be focusing on the similarities and differences in the techniques and features you used, focusing on the genre, function and audience.

For both specifications, remember to use the language levels or language framework to give a full and in-depth analysis. You should at least be using two of these and try to analyse higher level features, such patterns, like you would in any other essay.

Step 5: Edit your A-Level English Language NEA

When you’ve finally finished the writing of both your original piece(s) and your commentary, you may feel like you’re now finished. Wrong!

When it comes to any piece of writing, editing and proofreading is of upmost importance, but this is way more crucial for the original writing NEA. This is because of how linked the original writing piece(s) and the commentary are.

By this, I mean that you must check that everything you’ve mentioned in your commentary is actually present in your original writing. Also, you need to check that you’ve talked about enough points in your commentary from what you’ve actually written.

Also, when I was editing my original writing NEA, I looked at the high-level analysis that I wanted to include in my commentary, even if it wasn’t already in my original writing. Then I would edit it in afterwards.

How to write the A-Level English Language Investigation NEA

Just as a recap, the A-Level English Language investigation NEA requires students to carry out some kind of investigation into language and to write a report on this.

The A-Level English Language investigation NEA is the other piece of coursework for AQA as well as the NEA for OCR and WJEC. Once again, as we will be primarily looking at the AQA requirements, I will focus on the writing of the actual investigation report more than any other requirements from other exam boards.

You can see an exemplar answer from the OCR website , which includes the additional work required from this exam board.

Step 1: Plan your A-Level English Language NEA

Once you have an idea for your A-Level English Language investigation, you will need to plan it. If you haven’t got your idea yet, have a look at this great Think Student article that’s packed with language investigation NEA ideas.

Planning this NEA is down to two main things: planning how to do the investigation and planning the report. Planning how to do the investigation will completely depend on what your idea is.

For example, the investigation title that I came up with was ‘An investigation into how 3 generations of Jamaican immigrant use language differently’. For this, I was using members of my family, so I planned to do this by recording conversations with them, both 1-on-1 and altogether. You should also have an idea of what features you’re planning to analyse in your report.

Alternatively, your investigation may be ‘An investigation into how newspaper over time have represented migration’. For this, you will need to plan which newspapers you want to look at as well as which years and how far back, you want to go. Once again, you will need to think about which features you will want to highlight as part of your plan.

Then you need to plan your report. In this, you will need an introduction, the aims, the methodology, the analysis (which is the main bulk) and then a conclusion and evaluation.

In your plan, you should be outlining each of these sections. You will most likely need to keep coming back to this and adding as you do your research and actually carry out your investigation.

Step 2: Research for your A-Level English Language NEA

In your language investigation NEA, you will need to use at least some theories and research in your report. This will mostly just be for the write up so that you can link it to your own investigation. Although you may also want to link another linguistic investigation to your own investigation.

For example, some students have tried to recreate linguistic studies, such as Lakoff’s colour theory and Labov’s department store study using different factors. If you still need an idea, you may even want to start with something like this.

To carry out your research, you can use both physical books as well as using online resources. The important thing is to make sure that you keep track of exactly where all the information, sources and interpretations have come from so you can reference them in your NEA.

To do this, you may want to go to the library at your college or another one in your city or town. If there’s a local university nearby, you could see if it would be possible to visit their library too.

Step 3: Carry out the language investigation for your A-Level English Language NEA

Once again, how you carry out your language investigation will entirely depend on what your idea is. For me, I did 4 different sets of recordings and then I had to transcribe these.

If you’re using any type of audio, whether you recorded it yourself or found it from a TV show or something else, you will need to transcribe it. This transcription will then need to be in the appendix of your NEA.

Using both the transcription and the audio, you should then begin analysing in line with the title of your investigation.

If you’re using materials that are already written, you can go straight in with analysing in line with your title, as long as you have collected the materials already. These written materials will still need to be included in the appendix of your NEA.

Step 4: Write the introduction, aims and methodology of your A-Level English Language NEA

When you’ve actually done the research and carried out your investigation, you can now start writing. It can be helpful to break this into parts and what I would call “part 1” is the introduction, aims and methodology.

For the introduction, you need to outline your investigation and briefly explain what it is and why you chose it. You will also need to link in the research that directly links to your investigation.

For the aims section, you should try to have around three aims of your investigation. Although these should be in direct reference to the sections that you have picked out for your analysis. These aims can simply be bullet pointed and quite vague, for example one of mine was “comparing how three generations of Jamaican immigrant use lexis differently”.

For the methodology, you will need to explain exactly how you carried out your investigation. This includes everything from your actual process to protecting the identity of participants if you made recordings yourself and how you controlled variables.

Please note that you will also need to touch on this variable control in the evaluation.

Step 5: Write the main body of your A-Level English Language NEA

The main body of your NEA is the analysis. This analysis should be broken down into separate sections based on the language framework. Although how many sections you have and which language levels you use will depend on the nature of your NEA.

For example, my NEA was from recordings, so I focused on discourse features, phonetics, pronunciation and accent, and lexis and grammar. Whereas if you were looking at written materials for representation over time, you might focus on lexis and semantics, grammar, pragmatics and maybe even graphology.

Depending on how you choose to set it out, you may also wish to make subsections. For example, within my lexis and grammar section, I focused on pronouns.

In your analysis, you need to constantly be referring back to the title of your investigation and what each thing you analyse means in relation to this. You should also be referring to the research that you’ve mentioned in your introduction and try to compare this and once again saying what this shows in relation to your investigation title.

Step 6: Write the conclusion and evaluation of your A-Level English Language NEA

In your conclusion, you should be directly addressing your aims and saying if your investigation met the expectations you had. You should also be tying the information you’ve explored in your analysis together.

I did this by summing up each of my three participants’ language use individually from what I had already said in the analysis. Also, it’s important to remember that there shouldn’t bet be any new information in the conclusion.

In the evaluation, you are evaluating the methodology. So, you need to weigh up how effective your investigation was.

You should also outline the limitations it had and the reasons for this. This should include the variables that may have influenced things and the ones that you controlled.

Best of luck with your NEA!

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A Level English Language NEA A* Example Language Investigation

Subject: English

Age range: 16+

Resource type: Assessment and revision

Last updated

9 February 2024

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A Level English Language NEA A* Examples

Example coursework for both tasks in A Level English Language. Includes two full pieces of coursework & the data used to produce them. This language investigation & directed writing with commentary was submitted to AQA in summer 2017 and awarded an A*. This makes it the perfect example to show students what is required of them in the NEA. Why it works: * Shows how to use current A Level study as a toolkit to study language * Demonstrates how to organise & structure the write-up * Example of the level of analysis & interpretation needed for highest grades * Can be reworked as a template for *your* future (brilliant!) NEA Follow my twitter to stay updated with more essential free resources and news - @astarlevels [Check out my shop for more essays and revision resources!](https://www.tes.com/teaching-resources/shop/astarlevels)

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BridieKielty

brilliant NEA, helped to me to achieve my target grade

astarlevels

Aww thank you so much for the review Bridie & I'm glad that it did! Good luck with the exam!!!

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Extremely useful resource - well worth the money.

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So glad I bought this - will be very useful to show students to help with exam preparation. Thank you very much.

markwright11

Very well done on producing this high quality piece of coursework and thank you for sharing. Just what I was after!

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