An Exploration on the Influence of Emotion Words for SAT Essays for Chinese Students

Nowadays, studying oversea has received extreme favor in China and Chinese students who intend to study overseas in a high ranking university require more than a passing grade on their SAT writing test. However, researches on the factors that affect the score of the SAT essay for Chinese students were not enough and the researches based on sentiment analysis were even less. In this study, sentiment analysis is applied to the gathered SAT essays to explore the sentimental features of Chinese students in SAT essay from the point of sentiment polarity. In more details, word level will be the target of sentiment analysis in this paper, suggesting that the paper focuses on the emotion of each single word in the essay, that is to say, emotion words. Sentiment polarity generally refers to the negative, positive and neutral, which are corresponding to negative words, positive words and neutral words. A set of 570 Chinese students SAT writing corpus was included as the data source and after data processing, descriptive analysis and Pearson correlation coefficient are employed to analyze the text. It concludes that for Chinese students positive words are used more frequently and the positive correlation between the number of emotion words and essay score reveals that using more emotion words will improve the scores of SAT essay.