Reading instruction in 5th grade: teachers’ perspectives on promoting self-regulated reading in language and content area teaching

Self-regulated reading is an effective approach to foster reading comprehension, but many teachers are insecure about how to support strategic reading in natural classrooms. For a successful implementation of self-regulated reading into language and content area teaching discipline-specific strategy-oriented reading instruction has to be defined. This study analyzes teachers’ perspectives (N = 231) on the instruction of self-regulated reading in German language teaching, biology, and mathematics classes. The study reveals subject differences (e.g. the frequency of cognitive strategies in class), but also commonalities between subjects (e.g. the instruction of cognitive strategies and the frequency of metacognitive strategies, the activation of resource management strategies). The perspective on teachers’ discipline-specific reading instruction sheds light on content-specific as well as also cross-curricular reading instruction routines.