Investigating the effect of emotional tone on learners’ reading engagement and peer acknowledgement in social annotation

Social annotation fosters collaborative learning by encouraging knowledge sharing and a community of inquiry. However, research has primarily focused on the cognitive aspect of social annotation. This study aims to contribute an emotional perspective to the existing literature on social annotation. Specifically, we used the valence-aware dictionary for sentiment reasoning algorithm to measure students’ emotional tones in 1,954 comments posted during social annotation. We then utilised linear mixed-effect models to examine the effect of emotional tone on students’ reading engagement and peer acknowledgement, respectively. Our findings indicate that students who posted more positive sentiment comments were more likely to spend more time engaging in social annotation and receive peer acknowledgement. These findings offer insights into the significance of emotional tone in social annotation and the design of scaffolding strategies to foster positive emotional tone. Implications for practice or policy: Undergraduates’ peer acknowledgement can be enhanced by positive emotional tone in social annotation. Undergraduates engage more in active reading when their written comment expressed more positive sentiment in social annotation. Instructional designers and researchers can use sentiment analysis as an analytic approach to evaluate learners’ written texts for promoting peer interaction and reading engagement. Instructors and educators should consider understanding and monitoring the emotional tones students convey in their social annotations.