“Their encouragement makes me feel more confident”: Exploring peer effects on learner engagement in collaborative reading of academic texts

Abstract

Although it has been well noted that peer interaction can affect language learning outcomes, how it specifically impacts the learning process in group reading tasks remains underexplored. This article reports on a longitudinal case study, examining how peer interactions influence the engagement of five first-year university students in collaborative academic reading tasks and tracing the changes of peer effects on learner engagement over one academic semester. Data from multiple sources were collected, including audiotaped recordings of group discussions, peer feedback forms, and semi-structured interviews. The findings suggest that peers exerted influences on learners' behavioral, cognitive, social, and emotional engagement in the collaborative academic reading tasks. Throughout the semester, the participants demonstrated a developmental change of peer effects on different dimensions of their peers' engagement, veering their influence on each other from behavioral engagement to cognitive engagement and social engagement. Peer effects on each other's emotional engagement remained stable. This study identifies that students' metacognitive knowledge, familiarity with group members, and leadership play a critical role in shaping learner engagement. The findings provide important insights for researchers and teachers on the connection of students' peer influence with learning process in collaborative learning tasks.