Abstract
The contribution of self-regulation to academic achievement is supported by robust research evidence. Incorporating practices to enhance self-regulation during small-group reading instruction is associated with improved outcomes for upper-elementary students with learning disabilities in reading. Two evidence-based self-regulation practices are (a) recognizing negative thoughts and (b) using positive self-talk. However, there are challenges with effectively teaching these self-regulation strategies during reading instruction. In particular, special education or reading intervention teachers may find it difficult to incorporate this kind of self-regulation instruction during reading lessons in a way that does not overburden student working memory or take too much time from explicit, systematic instruction in reading skills. This article defines self-regulation, describes how to support students in recognizing negative thoughts and using positive self-talk, and provides guidance to enable teachers to implement self-regulation strategy instruction in a way that complements reading instruction.
Jason is a fourth grader who struggles to read words. His compensatory strategy for reading is guessing based on the pictures. Jason was below grade level in reading at the beginning of second grade, and a comprehensive evaluation at the end of the spring semester determined that he experienced significant learning difficulties. Testing indicated that he could benefit from special education services in both reading and math. Beginning in Grade 3, Jason was pulled daily for special services. When Jason started fourth grade, his special education teacher, Ms Lopez, noted that he often gave up easily or refused to participate in any activity with which he had been unsuccessful on his first try. She also noticed that Jason regularly sat off to one side of the horseshoe table and did not respond unless she called on him. One day, she called on him twice at the start of the class and he responded correctly both times. However, the third time she called on him, he responded incorrectly. Although she offered gentle, supportive error correction and scaffolding, Jason pushed his chair away from the table and said, “I’m stupid! This is stupid.” It was then that Ms Lopez realized she had a big task ahead of her this school year. She began to wonder: How could she help this sweet boy to stop being so hard on himself? How could she teach him to persist even when tasks were difficult? How could she teach him to believe in his own capacity to learn—to believe that with hard work he had the potential to become a reader? (see Note 1).
Research demonstrates that incorporating self-regulation strategies during reading instruction is important for students with severe reading difficulties, including learning disabilities (LD) in reading (Berkeley et al., 2011; Mason, 2013; Solís et al., 2017; Toste et al., 2017). However, there are challenges associated with effectively implementing self-regulation strategy instruction during reading instruction. Which self-regulation strategies should teachers implement? How can they address these self-regulation strategies without taking precious time away from reading instruction? More fundamentally, how can teachers address self-regulation strategies for students who have experienced failure enough times that their self-concept seems damaged? To support teachers like Ms Lopez, this article describes two effective self-regulation strategies (i.e., recognizing negative thoughts and using positive self-talk) and provides guidance related to how they can be implemented during reading instruction.
Impact of Self-Regulation on Student Learning
Self-regulation consists of “processes whereby learners personally activate and sustain cognitions, affects, and behaviors that are systematically oriented toward the attainment of personal goals” (Zimmerman & Schunk, 2011, p. 1). Learning is supported by engaging in self-regulatory behaviors, such as setting goals, paying attention to and concentrating on instruction, using strategies to remember information, monitoring performance, managing time, seeking assistance, believing in one’s capabilities, and experiencing positive outcomes (Zimmerman, 2002). It is not surprising, then, that students with self-regulation difficulties are likely to experience academic difficulties (Best et al., 2011; Blair & Raver, 2015; Klassen, 2010), nor that self-regulation difficulties are frequently experienced by students with LD in reading (Cutting et al., 2009; Morgan et al., 2017). Challenges with self-regulation have been shown to interfere with the development of foundational reading skills (e.g., phonological awareness and knowledge of sound-spelling correspondences) as well as of reading fluency and comprehension (Cain & Oakhill, 2006; Christopher et al., 2012; Locascio et al., 2010; Sesma et al., 2009; Swanson et al., 2009).
Students with self-regulatory difficulties compounded by reading disabilities may display poor task engagement (e.g., seem disinterested, unmotivated, or even visibly frustrated) when attempting to engage in reading activities (e.g., Morgan et al., 2008). These students, who have experienced repeated academic failures, often demonstrate less motivation to try their best or attempt to learn new things (Zentall & Beike, 2012). Furthermore, they may engage in overt negative behaviors, such as acting impulsively (e.g., interrupting others, not taking turns, repeatedly getting out of their seat), refusing to respond to teacher prompts during reading activities, voicing negative thoughts about their abilities, or engaging in oppositional or destructive behavior (Morgan et al., 2008). These behaviors impede learning and subsequent reading achievement.
In addition, students with self-regulatory difficulties and reading disabilities may experience low self-efficacy. For example, Cho et al. (2015) found that fourth-grade students with significant reading difficulties who demonstrated inadequate responding to a multicomponent reading intervention focused on fluent word reading, vocabulary, and comprehension, had lower self-efficacy than typical readers. These findings suggest that self-efficacy may play a role in struggling readers’ response to reading interventions and that it may be beneficial to teach such students self-regulation strategies that promote self-efficacy.
Incorporating Self-Regulation Practices During Reading Instruction
Reading instruction that incorporates principles of self-regulation has the potential to improve reading outcomes as well as student behavior (Mason, 2013; Morgan et al., 2008; Solís et al., 2017; Souvignier & Mokhlesgerami, 2006; Toste et al., 2017). Two self-regulation practices found to be effective for upper-elementary students with LD in reading are (a) recognizing negative thoughts and (b) using positive self-talk (Toland & Boyle, 2008; Toste et al., 2017). Recognizing negative thoughts and using positive self-talk can help students attribute their experiences of successes and failures to controllable factors, which supports motivation and self-efficacy (Diener & Dweck, 1978; Toland & Boyle, 2008).
For example, Toste et al. (2017) conducted a randomized controlled trial evaluating the efficacy of a small-group reading intervention and exploring the effects of an integrated motivational beliefs training component for readers in third and fourth grades who scored below the 37th percentile on one of the two Test of Word Reading Efficiency–Second Edition subtests. Students who received the motivational beliefs component were taught how to identify negative thoughts, generate positive self-talk, and make connections between positive thoughts and success. Compared with their peers, these students demonstrated greater gains on a reading comprehension measure (i.e., the sentence comprehension subtest of the Wide Range Achievement Test–Fourth Edition; g = .61) and higher scores on the attributions for success subscale of the Reading Attribution Scale (g = .74), suggesting that they were more likely to attribute success to internal causes (e.g., effort) than external causes (e.g., luck).
This article describes how special education or reading intervention teachers can incorporate these two self-regulation strategies during small-group reading instruction for upper-elementary students with LD in reading. To assist teachers in seeing how brief yet meaningful instruction in these strategies can be paired with reading instruction, this article provides sample activities adapted from Idea Detectives (Denton et al., 2017). Idea Detectives is a reading intervention for students in Grades 2 through 5 that includes recognizing negative thoughts and using positive self-talk to support self-regulation during reading. Research has demonstrated that special education and intervention teachers of students with significant reading difficulties in Grades 2 through 4 who implemented Idea Detectives considered the self-regulation component to be a vital part of the program (Denton et al., 2021). Teachers also perceived that their students’ negative self-concepts as readers had previously interfered with their reading progress and the self-regulation component had a positive effect on student confidence and self-esteem (Denton et al., 2021).
Ms Lopez discussed her concerns about Jason’s behavior and academic performance with another special education teacher who suggested that Ms Lopez look into strategies for teaching self-regulation. After researching the topic, Ms Lopez still was not sure how to incorporate self-regulation techniques into her reading lessons. She felt overwhelmed by the various components of self-regulation that needed to be taught—and was worried that providing instruction in self-regulation would take away from her reading instructional time. With all of the literacy objectives that she needed to address, how could she possibly also teach her students with reading difficulties that it is okay to make mistakes, that the important thing is to stay positive and keep trying, and that they can learn to read?
Strategy 1: Recognizing Negative Thoughts About Reading
Step 1
One way to develop students’ knowledge of self-regulation within a reading intervention is to read texts about how our brains, or our thoughts, control our emotions and behaviors. Teaching students to recognize negative thoughts can be incorporated into a non-fiction read-aloud about the brain, such as The Brain: All about Our Nervous System and More! (Simon, 2006). During this read-aloud, teachers can lay the groundwork for self-regulation by teaching three key things about the brain:
Teach students that the “front” part of their brain is the thinking part.
Explain to students that the emotional center is in the “back” part of the brain: here is where emotions like anger, fear, and frustration reside.
Describe to students how a person can move from using the “front” part of their brain to the “back” part in a matter of seconds. Internal triggers, such as negative self-thoughts, and external triggers, such as the words and actions of others, can affect the brain’s emotional center. When this part of a person’s brain is “hijacked” by negative thoughts, the person may be overcome with emotions, which may cause them to say or do things they later regret.
Figure 1 provides an example of how teachers might implement such an activity, including how they can support students’ reading comprehension during the activity.
Sample activity 1: Teaching students about their brains.
Step 2
The next step after this read-aloud is to take a few extra minutes to guide students in understanding a simple phrase to help them remember that their thoughts directly impact their feelings and behaviors: What “I think” determines what “I feel” and what “I do.” First, the teacher can emphasize that negative thoughts create negative emotions, which, in turn, manifest as negative behaviors that may lead to consequences that perpetuate the cycle. Next, the teacher can share examples of thoughts that lead to feelings and behaviors through a teacher think-aloud. This think-aloud should demonstrate that thoughts can have both positive and negative outcomes. Figure 2 illustrates how a teacher can use a think-aloud to further reinforce students’ connections between thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In this activity, the teacher demonstrates how a reader can have negative thoughts or positive thoughts about reading and how these different thoughts can lead to different outcomes.
Sample Activity 2: Teaching Students About Negative Thoughts and How They Affect Their Feelings and Behaviors.
Step 3
Then, as described in Figure 2, the teacher can lead a discussion through which students can relate experiences when their negative thoughts impacted their feelings and behaviors. For instance, a teacher may say, “Turn and talk with your partner about an experience you had when negative thoughts impacted your feelings and behaviors.” After each student has an opportunity to share with their partner, the teacher may ask students to volunteer to share their experience with the group. Based on the student’s response, the teacher can help identify the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors they experienced.
Step 4
The activity shown in Figure 2 incorporates a poster that prompts students to recall how what we think, feel, and do are related. Teachers may find it beneficial to create and post a poster like this one in the classroom. They can then briefly refer to it before students practice a difficult reading task. For instance, a teacher may say, We are about to read a difficult text that has lots of big words that you may not know. We learned that what I think determines what I feel and what I do. So, let’s remember to think positive, feel powerful, and do use our reading strategies when we read.
Reminders such as this one can be adapted for any type of reading activity.
Strategy 2: Using Positive Self-Talk When Reading is Hard
Step 1
Teachers can take the first step in helping students move away from negative thoughts by teaching them about the adaptive nature of their own brains. Again, teachers can start with a read-aloud, such as Your Fantastic, Elastic Brain (Deak, 2010), that can be used to teach students that everyone, including them, can “grow” their brain. Figure 3 represents a sample activity that focuses on teaching students about how their brains change and make connections when they learn and practice new things.
Sample activity 3: Teaching students about their growing brains.
Step 2
Once students understand how it is possible for the brain to change as a result of repeated thinking and practice, they are ready to take the next step. This step entails learning to use positive self-talk in place of the negative self-talk that too often triggers negative feelings and behaviors. Figure 4 provides a sample activity on teaching students a simple positive self-talk phrase: Keep moving forward! The activity also includes a game in which students are asked to identify whether the self-talk message in each scenario is a positive one or a negative one. By spending a few minutes before a reading activity to provide students with examples of positive, encouraging self-talk, teachers provide a strategy for overcoming negative thoughts by countering them with positive ones. When students have a storehouse of positive self-talk, they can learn to replace their negative thoughts with those positive phrases, effectively avoiding the hijacking of their brain’s emotional center.
Sample activity 4: Helping students recognize negative thoughts and replace them with positive thoughts.
During this step, one of the most powerful statements students can learn to make revolves around the word “yet.” Students who have experienced failure have learned to say, “I can’t do it.” Now that they understand that their brains can change and grow, they are ready to learn to add one word to change the statement from negative to positive: “I can’t do it yet.” For example, teachers can encourage use of the word “yet” during text reading when a student has trouble reading a difficult word or understanding what they are reading. This simple word can begin to change a student’s negative thoughts into positive ones—a perceived failure into a planned success—during any type of reading activity.
Step 3
Teachers can take an additional step to encourage this kind of positive self-talk through engaging in read-alouds like Not Yet (Cox & Hockema, 2017). Students can learn to say a phrase borrowed from this book when they feel challenged: Am I there? Not yet! Will I get there? You bet! Another powerful read-aloud focused on positive self-talk is When Pigs Fly (Coulman, 2017). The story is about a young cow named Ralph who wants a bicycle. His father tells him that he can have a bike “when pigs fly!” So, Ralph sets about using his problem-solving skills with the goal of realizing that unlikely scenario. Students will learn, like Ralph, to use the phrase “not yet!” when referring to obstacles they may face. Figure 5 provides a sample activity that incorporates a read-aloud and teaches students how to use positive self-talk phrases. See Table 1 for other book recommendations for teachers to use during read-aloud activities to support their students in developing self-regulation skills.
Sample activity 5: Teaching students positive self-talk phrases.
Read-Aloud Book Recommendations.
Step 4
Finally, once positive phrases are established, teachers can add this positive self-talk strategy to their repertoire of reading scaffolds, guiding students to engage in self-regulation via positive self-talk when they speak, or appear to be thinking, negative thoughts about themselves. Teachers can also encourage students to speak positive phrases to themselves any time they feel stuck or frustrated during reading instruction. For example, if a student seems to be frustrated with their difficulty decoding a word during a reading activity, the teacher can prompt the student to use a positive phrase that they have learned, such as “keep moving forward,” as well as scaffolding the student’s word reading. In addition, before students transition to group or independent practice using a new reading comprehension strategy, teachers can briefly remind students that trying new things is always challenging. Students should expect to encounter difficulties, and negative thoughts might start to form in their minds. Teachers can prompt students in advance to use these positive phrases when they need to replace negative thoughts with positive ones.
When Ms Lopez felt like she was ready to begin incorporating self-regulation strategies during her reading instruction, she decided to start with the related strategies of recognizing negative thoughts and replacing them with positive self-talk. First, instead of the read-aloud book that she usually used at this time of year, she chose a different book that would help her students learn about the way in which “what I think determines what I feel and what I do.” Next, as with any other book, she developed a comprehension purpose question for her students to think about while reading and to discuss afterward. This time, the question also prompted students to generate inferences about the relations between the character’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Then, during the after-reading discussion, Ms Lopez scaffolded students’ efforts to provide text evidence to support their inferences about the ways in which thoughts caused emotions and emotions caused behaviors. She was excited to hear her students distinguish between the character’s initial difficulty self-regulating his thoughts and his final success in doing so.
Ms Lopez was encouraged by how easy it was to accomplish reading objectives while also accomplishing self-regulation strategy instruction objectives. But she knew students still needed more instruction and opportunities to practice recognizing negative thoughts like the character in the read-aloud book demonstrated. For the rest of the week, she devoted the first 5 minutes of every reading lesson to providing students with practice in recognizing negative thoughts and replacing them with positive ones. During lessons, she reminded students to be prepared for negative thoughts to surface when they were working on challenging things and prompted them to draw on their positive self-talk phrases when they appeared to be thinking negative thoughts about themselves. After the first week of practice with this self-regulatory strategy, Ms Lopez no longer devoted the first 5 minutes of reading lessons to providing students with practice. Still, she made sure to prompt students to draw on self-talk phrases frequently during lessons.
As the school year progressed, Ms Lopez was amazed to see how teaching students about their “elastic” brains seemed to increase their motivation to learn to read words. She saw them begin to recognize negative thoughts and counter these thoughts with the positive self-talk phrases she had taught. She has seen the most improvement in Jason, who now regularly volunteers to read aloud and is always the first to offer an encouraging message when another student is in need of one.
Conclusion
Self-regulation describes an individual’s ability to modify their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors to attain a better outcome or reach a goal. In the classroom, a student’s lack of self-regulation skills may lead to increased challenging behaviors and decreased achievement (Best et al., 2011; Blair & Raver, 2015; Cutting et al., 2009; Klassen, 2010; Morgan et al., 2017). However, small-group reading interventions that incorporate a self-regulation instruction component have been shown to be effective in improving outcomes for upper-elementary students with reading difficulties (Mason, 2013; Solís et al., 2017; Toste et al., 2017) as well as improving student engagement and behavior (e.g., Mason, 2013; Morgan et al., 2008; Souvignier & Mokhlesgerami, 2006). This article describes two self-regulation strategies (i.e., recognizing negative thoughts and using positive self-talk) that can be incorporated into small-group reading instruction in several ways. By guiding students to use these self-regulation strategies while reading, special education and reading intervention teachers can expect to see improvements in students’ attitude, behavior, and reading performance.
There are two final things to note. For students with significant behavior problems, these self-regulation strategies may need to be coupled with more intensive behavioral interventions. For practice-oriented articles on this topic, see Collins and Landrum (2022) and Wehby and Kern (2014). In addition, it is important to acknowledge that the difficulties experienced by students with LD are often reflective of inequitable access to educational opportunities instead of or in addition to processing difficulties that are neurobiological in origin (Shifrer, 2013; Trainor & Robertson, 2022). For example, poverty and under-resourced schools (Sala & Knoeppel, 2017), inadequate instruction provided by under-prepared teachers (Wilcox et al., 2015), and inaccuracies in special education identification (Artiles et al., 2006) disproportionately impact access to equitable educational opportunities for students with LD. As social institutions, schools have an extensive history of perpetuating inequities for certain groups of students based on race/ethnicity, language, dis/ability. It is critical to consider students’ context and culture when incorporating self-regulation strategies during reading instruction for students with LD in reading.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
This research was supported in part by the Institute of Education Sciences, the U.S. Department of Education (grant no. R324A150171) to the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.
