Abstract
Chinese students are increasing interested in studying abroad and doing well in SAT is a strong requirement for admission into universities in the USA. This short paper investigates the use of emotional words in Chinese students ESL essay writing. Using 565 SAT essays, sentiment analysis with NRC Emotion Lexicon and statistical methods (including descriptive analysis and linear regression analysis) were employed to perform data analysis. The NRC lexicon is an emotional dictionary defining every word with polarities (positive and negative) and eight basic emotions (anticipation, trust, surprise, disgust, sadness, joy, fear and anger). The analysis revealed interesting results. First Chinese ESL students use more positive emotion words in their writing than negative emotion words. Second, both positive and negative emotion words significantly impact essay score. Third, within the eight dimensions of emotions, anticipation, trust, anger and fear have a significant impact on essay score. Previous studies suggest that culture and language proficiency may constitute to such a communication behavior among Chinese ESL learners.
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