Enhancement Project Reflection

During the fall semester of 2020 I completed a project in order to enhance my morphology and syntax class to an honors class. The project assigned was to collect a language sample of our own and complete both a syntactical analysis and a lexical diversity analysis. I collected my language sample from my 15 year old brother. The lexical diversity analysis calculates the diversity of a person’s vocabulary in each of the different parts of speech such as nouns, pronouns, verbs, etc. In order to find this information I had to separate each of the words that the boy said into their corresponding parts of speech. After separating them, I calculated the number of different words and total words in each section. To find the frequency of each type of speech, I then divide the number of different words in each section by the number of total words in that section to compete the analysis. The syntactical analysis is completed in order to find a child’s mean length of t-units (MLTU). A t-unit is a minimal unit constituting a complete sentence, consisting of one independent clause and any dependent clauses connected to it. In order to find this information, I had to separate the language sample into t-units and count the number of words present in each unit. After finding the number of words in each t-unit I added up the total amount of words and the total amount of t-units. I then divided the total number of words by the total number of t-units to find the MLTU.

This enhancement project was difficult however, it was a great experience to have. It was assigned near the end of the year when I was already preparing for finals and completing other final projects. This was stressful and gave me only a short amount of time to complete it, but I think it pushed me to see how well I could do quickly and under pressure. Looking back I am grateful for the time period we were given because I know in my future career it will be the same. This project allowed me to grow personally by pushing my limits as well as becoming more comfortable with the subject. I chose to enhance this class because I knew I would use the information being learned throughout the rest of my career and wanted to push myself and prepare myself the best I could. I think I made the correct choice in enhancing this class, though it was difficult, and would do it again if I had the same choice.

You can find the two analyses attached below.