This is the time of year when our attention turns to this.

I went to my notes on previous ideas I've picked up over the years and found these, which I think originated from Dick Hudson at UCL - but not 100% sure , cos these notes were just cut and pasted for my use - never intended to go further - anyway - these are not MY wordsand not deliberately plagiarised!
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an undergraduate last year who did a lovely study of play-ground language in her old primary school -
were the kids still using the same skipping rhymes etc as when she was there? Were they using the same ones as in the school down the road?
There's some literature on this - see
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/bib.htm

What are the grapheme-phoneme correspondences in the local accent, and do they show up in kids' spellings? See:
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/afg/lagbleeds.html.

You might like to visit the LAGB fact sheets that I've been trying to build for some years now, though without much uptake -
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/dick/facts.htm.

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Graveyards often get a mention as mini-projects
Look at words for death /the verses used / cliches used / the way the dead person was referred to /the grammar /graphology on gravestones.

Consider:
What can you infer about a society's attitudes to death from the gravestones?

Are there any diffs in the ways women and men are referred to?

Any children's graves?

ideas circulating re agony columns

Barbara says:

Adrian Beard's book on Language Change in the Routledge series has a short
section on Problem Pages over time, with examples from Victorian magazines.

He's also done an article in emagazine on Language Change, (Issue 24, April
2004), using one of these examples as the basis for exploring some key
issues about language change

someone else suggested comparing the answers given to the problems posed in Fridays'editions of the Grauniad, which is all on line, and seems like a pretty good idea, since the problem is answered by "readers" who express themselves in varous ways - can the student identify generic features for "professional" advisors, and compare to the "reader in the street" responses?

there might be some examples of agony aunt stuff in Angela Goddard's book "Researching Language" which I still think is a core text for this whole unit, full of good ideas.

Goddard's book does have something on problem pages. One of my weaker students did it last year; comparing pages across mags for different age groups: young female teens; young single female professionals and middle-years women. She managed to find out some interesting things that she hadn't known. It wasn't very original as such (except to her) but the Goddard text provided her with a framework that made this otherwise shaky student feel secure and she took it from there.

There's also an exemplar Language of Death Investigation in one of the AQA Phase material packs. It got an A and is a lovely example of a controlled and tidy investigation.

I wouldn't have got my investigations off the ground without you last year suze and it ended up being quite a huge learning curve! I have decided that I love doing them, though! Not a bad change after feeling as daunted as I did about them this time last year!

I have a guide to researching dialect, on my site, written by Barrie Rhodes. It's at:
www.universalteacher.org.uk/lang/dialectresearch.htm

I have an older, more general guide, with a few example tasks described, at:
www.universalteacher.org.uk/lang/unit4.htm

If you have suggested additions and emendations, then please let me know. (I always credit the source of these.)