Text Mining Indicators of Affect and Interaction: A Case Study of Students' Postings in a Blended-Learning Course of English for Specific Purposes

This is a case study of text cues of affect and interaction in students’ postings in a virtual learning environment designed to support and expand face-to-face classes of English for Specific Purposes at university level. These categories of text analysis are indicators of the learner’s social presence in online activities. Methodology in this study included (i) mining text indicators of affect and interaction; (ii) applying a questionnaire to investigate students’ perception of the environment; (iii) verifying how these results reflect the students’ level of satisfaction with the blended-learning approach.