Reading Difficulties, Reading-Related Self-Perceptions, and Strategies for Overcoming Negative Self-Beliefs

In this article, we review a number of studies on thedevelopmentofachievement-related self-system factors in relation to young children's reading acquisition. Reading self-concept, academic self-concept, and reading self-efficacy appear to develop in response to initial experiences in learning to read. For children who experience initial and ongoing success or difficulty in reading, development of relations between reading performance and self-system factors occurs within the first year of schooling. Our studies also show that phonological processing ability and letter-name knowledge at the outset of schooling not only predict subsequent reading performance but also academic self-concept and reading self-efficacy. Children who are deficient in phonological processing or state a preference for using text-level cues for identifying unfamiliar words in text rather than word-level information tend to develop difficulties in reading as well as negative reading-related self-perceptions. To overcome both skill deficiencies in reading and the negative reading- and achievement-related self-beliefsthat develop in response to reading difficulties, we maintain that attention to the development of word-level skills and strategies is essential. Inaddition, we advocate the use of attribution retraining methods, combined with appropriate skills training, for overcoming children's negative self-beliefs.