This article considers students’ and teachers’ perceptions of shared reading (SR) in promoting reading engagement. It provides a thematic analysis of focus groups with students and teachers at a Swedish upper-secondary school who participated in an intervention consisting of SR sessions. The findings are triangulated with a student pre-intervention questionnaire that included reading habits.

The study is theoretically informed by research about aspects of the multidimensional concept of reading engagement, by aesthetic theories about interpretation’s interrelation with presence and by psychological theories of joint attention and its effects on social cohesion, reflective reasoning and perspective-taking.

The students’ and teachers’ descriptions of their SR experiences show that they conceive of SR as a reading practice that may promote reading engagement. Reading engagement is found to have several dimensions, ranging from the behavioural and cognitive to the social and affective, which in turn are intertwined and reinforce one another.