Thorogood English

Category: A-Level English

In-depth resources for A-Level English Language students — linguistic frameworks, language investigation, creative writing, and exam technique. Expert guidance from a qualified teacher.

  • A-Level English Language: Discourse Analysis Explained

    Discourse analysis is one of the most powerful — and most frequently misunderstood — frameworks in A-Level English Language. It gives you tools for examining how language works above the level of the individual sentence: how conversations are structured, how texts create coherence, and how speakers and writers manage interaction. Here’s a clear introduction.

    What Is Discourse?

    Discourse refers to connected stretches of language — a conversation, a speech, an article, an email exchange — considered as a structured whole rather than as a series of isolated sentences. Discourse analysis asks how that structure works: how is it organised? How do speakers take and relinquish turns? How is meaning created not just in individual utterances but in the relationship between them?

    Key Concepts in Spoken Discourse

    Turn-taking: Conversations are organised into turns. Speakers don’t talk simultaneously (usually) — they take turns, and the mechanics of how they do this are governed by signals called turn-taking cues (verbal: “and you?”, “so…”, “anyway”; non-verbal: intonation fall, eye contact, pause). Disruptions to this — interruptions, overlaps, silence — are analytically significant.

    Adjacency pairs: Many utterances come in predictable pairs — question/answer, greeting/greeting, complaint/apology. If the expected second pair part doesn’t come, that absence is itself meaningful. The technical term for the expected but missing response is a “dispreferred second”.

    Topic management: Who introduces topics? Who closes them? Who changes the subject? Topic control is a form of conversational power, and in asymmetric conversations (doctor/patient, teacher/student, interviewer/interviewee) it’s often unequally distributed.

    Hedging and vagueness: Speakers use hedges (“kind of”, “sort of”, “I suppose”, “maybe”) to soften claims, avoid commitment, or signal tentativeness. The presence or absence of hedging tells you something about the speaker’s confidence, their relationship to the listener, or the social context of the interaction.

    Key Concepts in Written Discourse

    Cohesion: The linguistic mechanisms that create textual coherence — pronoun reference (“he”, “it”, “this”), lexical repetition and synonymy, conjunctions (“however”, “therefore”, “meanwhile”), ellipsis. Analysing cohesion tells you how a text holds together and creates the impression of a unified message.

    Schema: The background knowledge readers bring to texts. Writers assume certain shared knowledge in their readers — and texts that play with or subvert these assumptions create specific effects.

    In Exam Responses

    When analysing spoken data at A-Level, discourse-level features are often more revealing than word-level features — look at the structure of the conversation as a whole before zooming in on specific lexis. When did the balance of power shift? Where were the significant silences or overlaps? What adjacency pair was violated, and what does that violation signal?

    Discourse analysis — alongside phonology, pragmatics, and all the other language frameworks — is taught and applied throughout Thorogood English’s A-Level English Language programme. Join the waiting list for January 2027.

  • A-Level English Literature: How to Compare Two Texts

    The comparative essay is one of the most challenging forms in A-Level English Literature — and one of the most commonly done poorly. The most frequent mistake is treating “comparison” as alternation: a paragraph about Text A, then a paragraph about Text B, then another about Text A, with the word “similarly” or “however” dropped in to gesture at comparison without actually performing it. This guide explains how to do genuine comparison.

    The Key Distinction: Alternation vs. Integration

    Alternation looks like this: “In Text A, the writer uses imagery of light to suggest hope. In Text B, however, darkness is the dominant imagery, suggesting despair.” This is not comparison — it’s description of two texts with the word “however” between them.

    Integration looks like this: “Both writers use light and darkness as structuring images, but where Text A deploys the movement from darkness to light to enact a journey towards hope, Text B refuses this consolation — darkness is not the starting point but the destination.” This is comparison: it holds both texts in mind simultaneously and argues for a specific relationship between them.

    Build Your Comparison Around a Genuine Claim

    The best comparative essays have a central argument — a claim about how the two texts relate to each other. This is harder than it sounds, because the claim needs to be more specific than “both texts explore similar themes” (almost always true and therefore meaningless) or “the texts take opposite approaches” (usually too simple).

    A stronger comparative claim might be: “Both texts engage with the failure of the past to release the individual, but where Text A presents this as tragedy, Text B treats it with ironic detachment — a difference that reveals as much about their cultural contexts as about their formal choices.”

    Comparison Phrases That Actually Work

    Avoid: “Similarly…”, “In contrast…”, “However…” — these are additive, not analytical.

    Use instead: “While A does X, B does Y to different effect — suggesting…”, “Both writers… though where A…, B…”, “The distinction between A’s approach and B’s is most visible in…”, “What looks at first like a similarity becomes, on closer reading, a fundamental difference: both…, but…”

    On Evidence

    In a comparative essay, the most powerful moments are when you bring evidence from both texts into close proximity in the same paragraph — ideally the same sentence or consecutive sentences — and show precisely how the comparison works at the level of language. A paragraph that discusses Text A for six lines, then discusses Text B for six lines, doesn’t achieve this even if it ends with a comparison statement.

    Comparative essay writing is one of the skills Thorogood English develops systematically across the A-Level course — building the analytical vocabulary and argumentative confidence that distinguishes top-band responses. Join the waiting list for January 2027.

  • Politeness Theory for A-Level English Language: Face and Face-Saving Acts

    Politeness theory is one of the most practically useful frameworks in A-Level English Language — not just for exams, but because it gives you a precise vocabulary for something you intuitively understand: the complicated social dance of not offending people while still communicating what you need.

    What Is “Face”?

    The concept of “face” comes originally from Erving Goffman, who used it to describe the public self-image that we present and maintain in social interactions. Brown and Levinson developed this into a theory of politeness built around two types of face:

    • Positive face: The desire to be liked, approved of, and included — our need to feel that others value us and our desires
    • Negative face: The desire for autonomy and freedom from imposition — our need not to be told what to do or have our freedom constrained

    Most communicative acts are face-threatening acts (FTAs) — they threaten either the speaker’s or the hearer’s positive or negative face. Politeness strategies are the ways speakers manage or mitigate these threats.

    The Four Politeness Strategies

    Brown and Levinson identified four strategies for performing FTAs:

    1. Bald on record: The FTA is performed directly, without mitigation (“Shut the door”). Used when efficiency matters more than politeness, or between intimates where face is not at risk.
    2. Positive politeness: Strategies that address the hearer’s desire to be liked and included — complimenting them, finding common ground, including them in a group identity (“Let’s just pop in and have a quick look, shall we?”)
    3. Negative politeness: Strategies that address the hearer’s desire for autonomy — hedging, being indirect, apologising for the imposition (“I’m sorry to bother you, but I wonder if you might possibly be able to…”)
    4. Off record: The FTA is performed indirectly, so the speaker can deny having made it — hints, implicature, rhetorical questions (“It’s quite cold in here…” to mean “close the window”)

    Applying This in Exams

    When you encounter spoken data or written interaction in a language exam, ask:

    • What face threats are present in this interaction?
    • What politeness strategies are the speakers using to manage them?
    • Why might one strategy be used rather than another? (Power, distance, size of imposition)

    Brown and Levinson propose that the strategy chosen depends on three variables: the relative power of the speakers, their social distance, and the perceived imposition of the FTA. These are worth referencing explicitly in exam responses.

    Don’t just identify the strategy — explain why it makes sense in this particular social context. That’s where the marks are.

    Politeness theory, discourse analysis, and all the major language frameworks are covered in Thorogood English’s A-Level English Language classes. Join the waiting list for January 2027.

  • A-Level English Language: Language and Gender Explained

    Language and gender is one of the most debated topics in linguistics — and one of the most reliably assessed areas of A-Level English Language. It raises genuinely interesting questions: Do men and women really speak differently? If so, why? Are gender differences in language innate, learned, or constructed?

    Here’s a clear guide to the theories, the key theorists, and how to write about them effectively in exams.

    The Deficit Model (Lakoff)

    Robin Lakoff (1975) proposed that women’s language is deficient compared to men’s. She observed that women use more hedges (“I think”, “sort of”, “maybe”), tag questions (“It’s cold, isn’t it?”), empty adjectives (“divine”, “lovely”), and rising intonation in statements. On Lakoff’s account, these features reflect women’s subordinate social position — they’re linguistically less assertive, less confident, less direct.

    Criticism: Lakoff’s evidence was largely anecdotal, and her framing assumes male speech norms are superior. Later research has questioned both the empirical claims and the value judgements embedded in them.

    The Dominance Model (Zimmerman and West)

    Don Zimmerman and Candace West (1975) studied mixed-sex conversations and found that men interrupted women far more than women interrupted men. On the dominance model, language reflects and reinforces male dominance in society — men use language to maintain power, and interruptions are one mechanism for doing so.

    The Difference Model (Tannen)

    Deborah Tannen (1990) argued that men and women belong to different linguistic subcultures and use language for fundamentally different purposes. Men use language for report talk — conveying information, establishing status, solving problems. Women use language for rapport talk — building relationships, maintaining connection, sharing experience. Neither style is deficient; they’re just different, leading to systematic cross-gender misunderstanding.

    Criticism: Tannen has been accused of oversimplifying and reinforcing gender stereotypes. The difference model risks making essentialist claims about fixed male and female natures.

    The Communities of Practice Model (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet)

    Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet argued that gender differences in language aren’t fixed or universal — they’re constructed in specific social contexts (communities of practice). People perform gender differently in different situations, and linguistic choices are part of that performance. This connects to Butler’s notion of gender as performance rather than identity.

    In the Exam

    When analysing data involving language and gender:

    • Avoid making sweeping claims — say “this data suggests” rather than “women always…”
    • Consider whether gender is actually the relevant variable, or whether context, power, topic, or relationship might explain the patterns better
    • Use multiple theoretical frameworks — show you know more than one and can evaluate their applicability to the specific data
    • Quote specific linguistic features from the data (hedges, interruptions, topic shifts) and name them accurately

    Language and gender, along with all the major frameworks in A-Level English Language, is covered at Thorogood English. Join the waiting list for classes starting January 2027.

  • A-Level English Language: Child Language Acquisition Explained

    Child language acquisition — how children acquire their first language — is one of the most reliably assessed topics in A-Level English Language. It’s also one of the most genuinely interesting: the question of how any human being goes from no language to fluent communication in just a few years remains one of the most fascinating puzzles in all of linguistics.

    Here’s what you need to know — and how to write about it effectively in exams.

    The Key Theories

    Behaviourism (Skinner)

    B.F. Skinner proposed that children learn language the same way they learn any other behaviour: through imitation and reinforcement. Children imitate the speech they hear from adults; correct utterances are reinforced (praised or responded to appropriately); incorrect ones are not reinforced or are corrected. Language is, on this view, entirely learned from the environment.

    The problem: children routinely produce utterances they have never heard (“I goed to the shops”), suggesting they’re not simply imitating but applying rules. They also acquire language with remarkable speed and accuracy even without explicit instruction.

    Nativism (Chomsky)

    Noam Chomsky proposed that humans are born with an innate language acquisition device (LAD) — a built-in capacity for language that allows children to extract the grammatical rules of any language they’re exposed to. The evidence: all children acquire language in roughly the same sequence regardless of the language being learned; children acquire language at similar rates regardless of explicit teaching; and children produce systematic errors (overgeneralisation, like “goed”) that suggest they’re applying rules, not just imitating.

    Interactionism (Bruner)

    Jerome Bruner argued that neither innate capacity nor imitation alone explains acquisition — the social context of language learning matters too. He proposed the Language Acquisition Support System (LASS): the scaffolded interactions between child and caregiver (joint attention, turn-taking, the motherese or child-directed speech that adults naturally use with young children) that support language development. Language is acquired through social interaction, not just exposure.

    Key Milestones

    • Pre-linguistic stage (0–12 months): Cooing, babbling, intonation patterns. Children produce sounds before words.
    • Holophrastic stage (12–18 months): Single words used to convey whole meanings (“Milk!” can mean “I want milk”, “there is milk”, or “I spilled the milk”).
    • Two-word stage (18–24 months): Two-word combinations (“Mummy gone”, “More juice”). Grammatical function words (the, is, of) are absent — this is telegraphic speech.
    • Telegraphic stage (24–36 months): Three or more word utterances. Content words dominant; function words appearing. Systematic overgeneralisation of grammar rules (“I runned”).
    • Post-telegraphic / beyond (36 months+): Increasingly complex sentences; grammatical morphemes acquired; most grammatical rules mastered by age 5.

    Key Terms to Use Accurately

    • Overgeneralisation / overextension / underextension: Different error types at different stages
    • Virtuous errors: Systematic errors like “goed” that demonstrate rule application rather than mere imitation failure
    • Child-directed speech (CDS) / motherese: The modified speech adults use with young children — higher pitch, simplified vocabulary, shorter sentences, exaggerated intonation
    • Scaffolding: Adult support for language learning through structuring interaction appropriately to the child’s current level

    In exam responses, always connect the theoretical framework to specific evidence from any data provided. Don’t just name the theory — show how the data supports or complicates it.

    Language acquisition — along with all the other major topics in A-Level English Language — is covered in depth at Thorogood English. Join the waiting list for January 2027 classes.

  • A-Level English Literature: How to Compare Two Texts in the Exam

    Comparison questions — which ask you to compare two texts, two extracts, or a set text with an unseen passage — are some of the most intellectually demanding questions in A-Level English Literature. Many students respond to them by writing about Text A, then writing about Text B, and adding a brief paragraph at the end that says “both texts explore themes of loss.” This is not comparison. This is two separate analyses joined with a staple.

    The Core Principle: Integrate, Don’t Alternate

    True comparison happens sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph, not text by text. Each point you make should involve both texts simultaneously. You are not writing “In Text A… In Text B…” You are writing “Both writers render loss through imagery of natural decay, though where Keats situates this in seasonal change, Woolf locates it in the unchanged domestic detail of an abandoned room.”

    The difference is that the second version makes a genuinely comparative point — it names what is shared and immediately marks the distinction. The examiner can see the comparison happening, not just hear you promise it will happen later.

    Use Connectives That Force Comparison

    Train yourself to use at least one comparative connective in every paragraph: similarly, whereas, by contrast, both writers, unlike, on the other hand, this idea is developed/subverted/complicated in… If you find yourself writing a paragraph with no connective linking both texts, you are describing rather than comparing.

    Three Structural Approaches

    Point-by-point (recommended): Each paragraph makes one comparative point that covers both texts. Most sophisticated — produces genuinely integrated comparison. Best when texts have clear points of connection.

    Block with embedded comparison: Write primarily about Text A with constant reference to Text B, then reverse. Works if texts are very different in nature; risks drifting into separate analysis unless you consciously sustain the cross-referencing.

    Thematic: Organise by idea rather than text, both texts discussed under each theme. Very strong if done well, but requires confident advance planning.

    What Genuine Comparison Produces

    The strongest comparative essays do more than list similarities and differences — they use the comparison to produce insight that neither text alone would yield. If you could remove one text from your essay and it would still make sense as a response about the remaining text, you have not achieved genuine comparison. A comparison should illuminate something about both texts that becomes visible only when they are placed alongside each other.

    Essay technique is taught in depth at Thorogood English’s A-Level classes. Join the waiting list for January 2027.

  • A-Level English Language: Language Change and Why It Matters

    Language change is the topic in A-Level English Language where students most reliably let their own opinions derail their analysis. Whether they’re outraged by teenagers’ use of “literally” or cheerfully indifferent to shifting grammar conventions, they bring personal perspectives to a topic that rewards academic distance and careful evidence-based argument.

    Here’s what the language change topic actually covers — and how to write about it in a way that earns marks rather than reflecting personal taste.

    What Language Change Means

    Language change refers to the fact that English — like all living languages — shifts constantly over time, in its vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation, and use. Words are invented, old words fall away, meanings shift, grammatical structures become more or less common, spelling conventions evolve.

    At A-Level, you’ll examine evidence of these changes — comparing historical texts to modern ones, analysing how specific words or structures have changed, exploring what drives those changes — and you’ll engage with the debate about whether language change is something to resist or accept.

    The Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism Debate

    This is the central theoretical framework for language change at A-Level, and you must understand it clearly.

    Prescriptivism is the view that there is a correct standard form of English, that deviations from it are errors, and that it’s the job of educated speakers and institutions to maintain the standard. Prescriptivists worry about declining standards, object to grammatical constructions like the split infinitive or the singular “they”, and value traditional usage guides.

    Descriptivism is the view of most linguists: that the job of linguistic study is to describe language as it actually is and how it changes, not to prescribe how it should be. Descriptivists don’t think language change is decline — they see it as natural development, and they point out that every “corruption” of English that prescriptivists object to was itself a change from an earlier standard.

    In exam responses, you should engage with both perspectives as equally valid academic positions — and you should use linguistic evidence to support your argument rather than personal preference.

    Key Causes of Language Change

    • Technology and new concepts: New things require new words — “internet”, “tweet”, “podcast” didn’t exist before the things they described
    • Social and cultural change: Shifting attitudes to gender, ethnicity, and identity drive vocabulary change — both the adoption of new terms and the retirement of old ones
    • Borrowing from other languages: English has always borrowed vocabulary freely — from Latin, French, Norse, and now increasingly from global English varieties
    • Media and popular culture: Words and phrases spread through social media, television, and music in ways that earlier generations of language change couldn’t achieve
    • Simplification and regularisation: Over time, complex grammatical systems often simplify — Old English’s elaborate case system collapsed into the much simpler system of modern English

    How to Write About Language Change in an Exam

    The key principle: your personal view is irrelevant. “I think using ‘literally’ as an intensifier is annoying” is not a linguistic argument. “The use of ‘literally’ as an intensifier demonstrates semantic bleaching — a well-documented process in which a word’s specific meaning is widened or generalised through frequent metaphorical use” is a linguistic argument. The second earns marks; the first doesn’t.

    Ground every point in linguistic evidence: historical texts, corpus data (if provided), specific examples. Use theoretical frameworks — semantic change, grammatical convergence, language contact — to explain patterns. Acknowledge complexity: very few changes are simply good or simply bad; most serve communicative functions for specific communities, even if they seem incorrect from other communities’ perspectives.

    Language change, diversity, and acquisition are covered in depth in Thorogood English’s A-Level English Language programme. Join the waiting list for January 2027 classes.

  • A-Level English Language Creative Writing: How to Write a Commentary

    At A-Level English Language, the creative writing component requires two things: a piece of original writing, and a commentary on it. The commentary is not an afterthought — it’s worth significant marks, and it tests a specific skill that is quite different from the skill of writing the piece itself.

    The skill is this: talking about your own language choices analytically, using linguistic frameworks, in a way that demonstrates genuine awareness of what you were doing and why.

    What a Commentary Is — and Isn’t

    A commentary is not a summary of your piece (“In the first paragraph, I wrote about…”). It is not a description of what you were trying to do in vague terms (“I wanted to make it dramatic”). And it is not an apology for what you didn’t manage to achieve.

    A commentary is an analytical reflection on your own linguistic choices — the specific decisions you made about form, genre, register, lexis, grammar, and structure, grounded in the frameworks you’ve been studying, and connected to the purpose and audience of your piece.

    Write the Commentary Alongside the Piece

    The most useful piece of advice: don’t write the piece and then try to write a commentary on it afterwards from memory. Write both together. As you make a significant decision in the writing — choosing a particular register, using a specific sentence structure for effect, drawing on a genre convention — note it immediately. “Used short declarative sentences here to create urgency” in the margin of your draft becomes the core of a commentary point when you come to write it up.

    Writers who write the piece fully and then try to reverse-engineer a commentary are working much harder than they need to — and often produce commentaries that feel strained, because they’re discovering (or inventing) the rationale retrospectively.

    What to Include in Your Commentary

    Purpose and Audience

    Establish clearly what you were trying to achieve and for whom. This context shapes all your other choices and gives the examiner the framework for evaluating them. Be specific: not “I wanted to entertain” but “I was aiming for a piece that would appeal to adult readers familiar with the conventions of Gothic fiction, deliberately subverting genre expectations by…”

    Form and Structure

    Why did you choose this form? How did you structure the piece, and why? If you chose a non-linear structure, what effect does that create? If you used a genre convention, were you following it, subverting it, or playing with it — and why?

    Specific Language Choices

    This is the heart of the commentary. Choose four or five specific language choices — a verb, a sentence structure, a lexical field, a phonological pattern — and analyse them. Why this word rather than another? What connotations does it carry? How does it relate to the piece’s overall tone and purpose?

    Use the linguistic frameworks: lexis, grammar, phonology, graphology, pragmatics, discourse. You don’t need to force all of them in, but you should draw on at least two or three, and you should use the terminology precisely.

    What You Would Change

    Many mark schemes reward a brief honest reflection on what you might do differently — what you were attempting but feel you didn’t quite achieve, or what you’d explore if you had more words. This demonstrates critical distance from your own work, which is a sophisticated intellectual move. Don’t dwell on failure, but don’t be afraid of honest self-evaluation either.

    Tone and Length

    The commentary should read like analytical writing — precise, evidence-based, and confident, but not academic in the heavy sense. You’re reflecting on your creative decisions, not writing a dissertation. Aim for a tone that’s engaged and thoughtful: you’re a writer thinking clearly about craft.

    Most commentaries at this level should be around 300–500 words — enough to make substantive points but focused enough to remain analytical rather than drifting into description.

    A-Level English Language at Thorogood English includes dedicated work on the creative writing component and commentary, with individual feedback at every stage. Join the waiting list for January 2027 classes.

  • IGCSE vs A-Level English: What’s the Difference and How Do You Bridge the Gap?

    Many students who do well at IGCSE English find A-Level harder than they expected. This surprises them — and their parents. After all, English is English, isn’t it? Good readers and good writers should continue to be good readers and good writers at A-Level.

    This is true — but A-Level English asks for something additional and different from IGCSE, and students who aren’t aware of the shift often find themselves struggling in ways they don’t understand. Here’s what changes — and how to bridge the gap.

    The Biggest Change: You Have to Think About Language, Not Just Through It

    At IGCSE, language is a tool. You use it to read, write, and analyse literary texts. You are assessed on whether you can use it well.

    At A-Level English Language, language itself becomes the subject. You study how language works as a system: how meaning is made, how communication succeeds and fails, how language varies across contexts and communities, how it changes over time. This is a significant conceptual shift — from “what does this text say?” to “how does language construct meaning?”

    A-Level English Literature, meanwhile, requires a much more extended, independent engagement with texts — including contextual research, awareness of critical debate, and the ability to construct a sustained argument across a long essay rather than a paragraph-based response.

    What Stays the Same

    The fundamentals carry over. Close reading — noticing what specific language choices do, why a writer made this decision rather than another — is the core skill at IGCSE and it remains the core skill at A-Level. Students who have genuinely internalised that skill at IGCSE will find it transferable; they’ll need to apply it to different kinds of texts and in more complex ways, but the instinct is the same.

    Essay writing structure — clear argument, well-evidenced, logically sequenced — also carries over, though the level of sophistication expected increases significantly.

    What Gets Harder

    • Essay length and sustained argument: A-Level essays are longer and expect a more developed, independent argument — not a set of connected points but a genuinely exploratory analysis
    • Independent reading: A-Level Literature requires significant reading outside the set texts — criticism, context, related texts
    • Technical vocabulary: A-Level English Language introduces precise linguistic terminology (deixis, hedging, face-threatening acts, graphology) that has no equivalent at IGCSE
    • Time management: A-Level exams are longer and more demanding; students accustomed to IGCSE time management often need to recalibrate
    • Independent coursework: The language investigation and creative writing portfolio require self-directed work over an extended period — a different skill from timed exam performance

    How to Prepare Over the Summer

    If your child is moving from IGCSE to A-Level English, the summer between is a genuine opportunity. Some valuable things to do:

    • Read widely — novels, essays, long-form journalism, memoir. A-Level rewards breadth of reading in ways that IGCSE doesn’t always.
    • Start to notice language analytically in everyday life: how does an advertisement construct its appeal? What register does a text message from a friend use compared to a text from a parent?
    • If taking English Language: familiarise yourself with the basic linguistic frameworks (lexis, grammar, phonology, pragmatics, discourse) so they don’t feel alien in September
    • If taking English Literature: read at least one of the set texts before the course begins and engage with it thoughtfully — not to study it, but to read it as a whole and form your own response

    Thorogood English offers A-Level English Language in small groups from January 2027. If your child is approaching this transition, get in touch — and join the waiting list to secure a place.

  • A-Level English Language Investigation: How to Choose the Right Topic

    The language investigation is the coursework component that distinguishes A-Level English Language from the purely essay-based papers. It’s also the piece of work students most commonly either choose badly — picking a topic that looks interesting but turns out to be unworkable — or leave until too late.

    Getting the topic right early makes everything else easier. Here’s how to do it.

    What the Investigation Actually Involves

    The investigation asks you to collect real language data, apply linguistic frameworks to analyse it, and draw conclusions about patterns, features, or variations. You’ll need a research question (sometimes called an “aim”), a methodology section explaining how you collected your data, an analysis section applying frameworks, and a conclusion reflecting on what you found.

    The topic needs to generate a sufficient quantity and variety of analysable data. It needs to be genuinely investigative — not simply descriptive. And it needs to be narrow enough that you can say something specific and interesting, rather than vaguely general.

    Choosing a Topic: Three Questions

    1. Can I actually collect this data?

    This is the most practical question and it comes first. A fascinating research question is worthless if the data to investigate it doesn’t exist or can’t be accessed. You need real language samples — transcripts of conversations, written texts, social media posts, advertising copy, historical documents — that you can obtain within the time available.

    Good data sources include: conversations you can record and transcribe yourself, text messages and group chats (with permission from those involved), social media comments, news articles across different publications, historical texts available online, menus, product descriptions, instructional texts, or speeches.

    2. Is there something genuinely to investigate?

    The best topics have a genuine research question — a question you don’t already know the answer to, and whose answer might be interesting. “How do people talk?” is not an investigation. “How do male and female friends use hedging and interruption differently in casual conversation?” is an investigation — it has a specific linguistic phenomenon, a defined context, and a meaningful comparison to draw.

    Good investigation structures involve comparison: across genders, age groups, publications, time periods, regions, or registers. Comparison gives you something to analyse and draw conclusions from rather than simply describing a single text type.

    3. Can I connect it to linguistic theory?

    The investigation should be grounded in the language concepts you’ve studied. Before finalising your topic, check that you can name at least three or four theoretical frameworks or concepts that relate to it — and that you know what those theories say. A topic on gender and language connects to Deborah Tannen, Robin Lakoff, and Grice’s maxims. A topic on language change connects to prescriptivism and descriptivism. If you can’t think of the relevant theory, the topic probably isn’t the right fit.

    Topics That Work Well

    • Language and gender: comparing speech patterns, online communication, or written texts produced by different genders
    • Language change: comparing historical texts (advertisements, newspapers, recipe books) from different decades
    • Regional variation: comparing dialect features in transcripts from different areas
    • Professional register: comparing the language of the same profession across time (medical language, legal language, sports commentary)
    • Child language acquisition: analysing transcripts of young children’s speech development
    • Online and social media language: comparing language across platforms or comparing formal and informal registers in digital contexts
    • Political language: analysing speeches across different politicians, parties, or eras

    Topics That Often Don’t Work

    • Topics where the conclusion is already obvious before you start (“politicians use persuasive language in speeches” — yes, they do, now what?)
    • Topics where the data is too homogeneous — only one type of text, only one speaker, no variation to analyse
    • Topics so broad that you can’t say anything specific (“the language of advertising”)
    • Topics requiring data you can’t actually obtain (historical spoken language, private conversations you have no access to)

    Start Early — and Talk to Your Teacher

    The investigation is typically due in Year 13, but the earlier you settle on a topic and start collecting data, the better. A topic chosen in June of Year 12 gives you the summer to gather data at leisure. A topic chosen in October of Year 13 gives you a few frantic weeks to gather and analyse before the deadline.

    Discuss your topic with your teacher or tutor before committing. An experienced teacher will quickly identify whether a topic is workable and, if not, nudge it in a direction that is.

    A-Level English Language at Thorogood English includes support for the language investigation at every stage — from topic selection through methodology, analysis, and final write-up. Join the waiting list for January 2027 classes.