Camille Van Katwyk Yorgason and Drs. Deryle Lonsdale and Diane Strong-Krause, Linguistics and English Language
English is an important skill in today’s world – in the job market as well as in our worldwide Church. BYU has a unique opportunity to assist many international students, including returned missionaries involved in the Perpetual Education Fund, to learn English through its English Language Center (ELC). This center is limited in the number of students it can reach because of the cost and time involved for teachers to perform tasks such as the grading of essays of lower proficiency students. My project was to work on the development of a computer program that evaluates the essays of non-native speakers of English. This program could be applied in an independent study course in beginning English, thereby offering the blessing of a BYU education to more people around the world at lower costs. It could also be beneficial to students physically enrolled at the ELC by giving a more consistent, timely, and objective approach to their essays.
Dr. Lonsdale had already developed a prototype system that examines syntactic structure. With his help, I was to add two more functions: vocabulary and length. I was to apply this program to new essays that had already been human-rated and compare the results. As a first step, Dr. Strong-Krause gave me a data set of essays to read and explained the criteria of the grading system. I then practiced by rating the essays myself. I compared my grades to those of the teacher until I could easily identify the proper grade of each essay. My next task was to meet several times with Dr. Lonsdale to work on the programming until the computer system could give an accurate grade for each essay, as well.
This project was very enjoyable for me because of the time that I was privileged to spend with these wonderful mentors. I grew intellectually and spiritually through their examples and tutelage. I did confront roadblocks that were difficult. For instance, I thought that I would be doing the bulk of the programming, but it was a slower and more challenging process for me than I had anticipated. Thus, Dr. Lonsdale ended up doing most of that kind of work while I assisted in other ways. Through many attempts, the program failed miserably to accurately grade the essays, but we worked together up until the day before my graduation to improve the project and the program finally began to make correct assessments. Most unfortunately, somehow in my move the day after my graduation, I lost all the results and data of this undertaking we had worked so diligently to finish, so I can’t make a specific report on the percentage of essays the program can now evaluate. I was not able to present or publish our findings, but I trust that Dr. Lonsdale can reproduce the results of the data as desired.
Thus, further work is needed. A new data set must be run through the system in order to reproduce the findings of my project. More capabilities can then be added to the program to improve its performance. Through these measures and others, we can draw closer to the goal of a beginning English independent study course, increasing the capacity of BYU to reach more individuals around the world.