Teaching receptive language skills: recommendations for instructors

Abstract

Receptive language refers to responding appropriately to another person's spoken language. Most curricula dedicate a proportion of early intervention to developing receptive language skills. The specific terms used to refer to the receptive language programs and the recommendations for teaching such skills vary considerably across the early intervention curricula. The present paper will provide a conceptual analysis of the desired controlling variables for different receptive language programs, teaching recommendations, a brief review of the literature to substantiate the teaching recommendations, and a discussion of the potential negative effects of deviating from the recommendations.

Keywords: autism; developmental disabilities; early intervention; instructional strategies; listener behavior; receptive language.

Figure 1

The example data collection sheet illustrates how to properly counterbalance three visual comparison stimuli in an array and the rotation of the discriminative stimulus (i.e., the bolded stimulus) during a receptive identification of actions program.

Figure 2

The example data collection sheet illustrates how to properly counterbalance the auditory discriminative stimuli during a receptive instructions program.