This study is an investigation of readers' posts to an online forum devoted to the discussion of short stories and poems. The ELT Online Reading Group (ORG) ̶ an electronic version of a face-to-face reading circle ̶ aimed at promoting the development of reading skills and the reading and discussion of literature among teachers, trainee teachers and other professionals in the field of English language teaching (ELT). This paper focuses on the multi-layered relationships between readers in the group by looking at some of the distinctive features of participants' posts. Results suggest that there is a dialogical orientation in the communicative strategies participants employed in the forum and that those are similar to the ones observed in face-to-face reading groups. The internal 'stratification of discourse' and the 'diversity of social speech types' that Bakhtin (1981: 262) argues are present in the Novel have also been observed in the forum posts. The findings of this study may be relevant to an assessment of the viability and usefulness of establishing online reading groups as tools to promote the development of members' reading skills, the creation of communities of readers, and a re-evaluation of the role of literature in language teacher education.

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