Pathways to Reading Competence: Emotional Self-regulation, Literacy Contexts, and Embodied Learning Processes

Abstract

Reading competence is one of the main gateways to learning and serves as the foundation for nearly all academic subjects, but reading is not a natural skill. For beginning and struggling readers, the process of learning to read is often fraught with frustration. Thus, abilities to manage affect or emotions and maintain attention or focus (i.e. emotional self-regulation processes) are critical for literacy development and reading competence. Building on bio-social-ecological systems and contextual-developmental frameworks, we present a model of reading competence to integrate multidisciplinary empirical research on the fit between children’s emotional self-regulation processes and their literacy contexts and how these person-in-context dynamics influence reading competence through reading motivation and engagement. We present empirical research in support of the pathways in this model of reading competence, and call for increased multidisciplinary research that takes into consideration children’s literacy contexts and their neurobiological and behavioral assets as well as vulnerabilities in order to better understand the dynamical cognitive-emotional-motivational processes that underlie the development of reading competence from early childhood through young adulthood, including the timing and mechanisms of change to target for reading interventions to have optimal impact.