Strategy use in collaborative academic reading: Understanding how undergraduate students co-construct comprehension of academic texts

While research has indicated that college students may benefit from collaboratively reading academic texts, little is known about how they co-construct comprehension through text-based discussions. This case study focused on two groups of undergraduate students with different degrees of participation in discussions – one active group and one silent group – in a course on English for academic purposes (EAP) at a Chinese university. Drawing upon classroom observation and semi-structured interviews, the study investigated the spontaneous use of reading strategies in 10 post-reading group discussions and probed into the key processes for comprehension building shared by the two groups. The findings suggest that the students utilized a series of reading strategies and drew on the ideational and linguistic resources shared within the group to build comprehension. Three key processes for comprehension co-construction were found: (1) paraphrasing to contribute personal understanding, (2) elaborating to clarify meanings, and (3) summarizing to build consensus. Pedagogical implications concerning the instruction and task design for collaborative academic reading are discussed.