Development of reading self-concept in young children was examined in 4 experiments. Experiment 1 revealed a negative item response phenomenon similar to that reported by H. W. Marsh (1986), who found that children's responses to negative items on a self-concept scale were inconsistent with their responses to positive items. In Experiment 2, developmental psycholinguistic factors were considered in an effort to eliminate the negative item response phenomenon by changing the wording and presentation of the items. Experiment 3 suggested that reading self-concept may be defined as comprising three subcomponents: perceptions of competence in reading, perceptions of difficulty with reading, and attitudes toward reading. Experiment 4 showed how the relations among these subcomponents change with increasing age and how they relate to the development of reading and reading-related skills.

Relations between academic self-concept (ASC) and measures of reading-related performance and self-concept were examined in 60 beginning school children who, after 2 years of schooling, were assessed as having positive, negative, or typical ASCs. Data were collected soon after school entry, toward the end of Years 1 and 2, and during the middle of Year 3. Children with negative ASCs performed poorly on reading-related tasks and reported more negative reading self-concepts than did children with positive or typical ASCs. Reading was also highly predictive of negative and positive ASC group membership, but not of typical ASC group membership. Past studies of relations between ASC and achievement involving full-range samples of young children have underestimated the point in time when these factors become causally related to each other. The negative consequences of young children developing patterns of difficulty in learning to read are discussed.Several studies have examined the relations between selfconcept and achievement and their importance for classroom practice (Bracken, 1996;Byrne, 1996;Strein, 1993). Strein (1993) noted that a "surge in published research on self-concept in general, and academic self-concept in particular, has made this topic one of the 'hottest' areas in the educational psychology literature" (p. 273). The major focus of this interest is on the relations between academic self-concept and achievement. In her review of research on academic self-concept (ASC), Byrne (1996) noted that the abundance of studies devoted to this topic over the past 30 years is evidence of the substantial interest in the link between ASC and achievement.This link is important because achievement-related selfperceptions are thought to influence achievement through their effect on motivation (e.g., Borkowski, Carr, Rellinger, & Pressley, 1990; Schunk, 1991) and the self-regulation processes of metacognition (Borkowski et al., 1992). In the context of reading, Henk and Melnick (1992) observed that the motivational influence of academic self-perceptions determines whether "opportunities to read would be sought or avoided, the amount of effort that would be expended during reading, and the degree of persistence in pursuing text comprehension" (p. 111).Numerous studies have examined the causal link between ASC and achievement (Byrne, 1996; Marsh & Craven, 1997), and it appears that the causal ordering of these two variables changes with age. For young children, achievement appears to be causally

Initial reading-related experiences in school are associated with the development of reading self-concepts within the first two and a half years of schooling. This period may mark the time during which negative 'Matthew effects' develop for those who experience initial difficulties in learning to read.

This study investigated the hypothesis that the contributions of oral language comprehension (C) and word recognition (D) to reading comprehension (R) in the simple view of reading (SVR) are not independent because a component of C (vocabulary knowledge) directly contributes to the variance in D. Three analysis procedures (hierarchical regression analysis, exploratory factor analysis, and structural equation modeling) were used to analyze data obtained from a sample (N = 122) of 7-year-old students who were administered tests of vocabulary knowledge, nonword reading, word recognition (two standardized tests), and parallel forms of listening and reading comprehension. Results from the regression analysis indicated that vocabulary made a contribution to R beyond that made by word recognition and listening comprehension; results from the exploratory factor analysis showed that two factors (Decoding and Linguistic Comprehension) were extracted, with vocabulary and listening comprehension loading highly on the Linguistic Comprehension factor; and results from structural equation modeling revealed that the latent construct, C, influenced R not only directly but also indirectly through the latent construct, D.

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