The present work studies two aspects that influence in scholar performance: word recognition (process of word decoding realized for a person during reading or writing) and self-concept (children perception of herself), that has been studied in personal, scholar, familiar and social contexts. The research purposed recognizes difficulty in reading and writing learning and verify correlations between word recognition and self-concept. For this, an instrument of words recognition and a self-concept scale have been applied, collectively, in 230 classmates, in 2ª, 3ª and 4ª grades of public elementary school, of two schools, being one from central and another from peripheral of the city of Uberlândia-MG. Significant difference has been found, in relation with gender, concerning personal self-concept, with higher scores belonging to girls (p = 0,002). The central school has been expressively better in words recognition (difference with p = 0), just like the group of girls, compared with boys (difference with p = 0,002). In peripheral school, the number of wrong answers increases, in expressive way, as grades progression. Finally, positive correlations, statistical significant (with p = 0), between the results of words recognition's instrument and all contexts of self-concept scale, that highlight that social and affective variables influence the performance in writing and reading.