The effects of a self-talk intervention on elementary students’ motor task performance

The aim of the present study was to examine the effects of an instructional self-talk intervention on elementary students' (M age = 10.82 years, ±0.72) motor performance in a soccer task. Participants were 45 elementary students who were randomly assigned into two groups one experimental and one control group. A three-day practice was administered to the two groups, with the experimental group using instructional self-talk. Repeated measures analysis of variance revealed that from baseline to final measure both groups improved their performance; however, the improvement of the self-talk group was larger compared with that of the control group. This resulted in the two groups displaying significant differences in the final measure (p < 0.01). In general, the results provided support for the beneficial effects of self-talk intervention programmes for task enhancement, and in particular show that such interventions can be effective from the ages of elementary school students.