Computer aided instruction in the skills of linguistic analysis

Students on the B.A. (honours) in Communication Studies at Sheffield City Polytechnic study linguistics as part of their degree. These students seem to vary considerably in their abilities to analyse sentences. The difficulties that they experience seem to be the same for each successive intake even though the difficulties may not be shared by many students in any particular year. Thus, the teacher of linguistic analysis often needs to resort to individual student tuition to deal with the same problems year after year. The computer aided instruction program described in this paper seeks to overcome these problems. It enables students to progress at their own rate through a series of exercises designed to instruct them in immediate constituent analysis. The program was found to be very successful in achieving its linguistic objectives and also in producing a remarkably high degree of interest in computers.