What can our Verbal Behaviour Consultants help with?
We define our early learners as those who have limited spontaneous language, regardless of age and other skills. We teach the people closest to these children how to create new motivators for our learners, and then how to contrive opportunities for our children to request these items hundreds of times a day. We teach simple intraverbals at this stage, such as phrase and song fill-ins. Whilst our learner is still at the early stages, the majority of teaching takes place in the natural environment: at the park, in the swimming pool and around typical daily routines.
At Verbal Behaviour Consultants, we have found that the parents of our learners know them best and we honour this by equipping them with all of the understanding and skills necessary. In doing this, parents don’t need to be bombarded with hundreds of professionals and people walking in and out of their lives, allowing optimal acquisition rate of language. Whilst your child is at the early learner stage, we will pair the intensive learning environment with reinforcement so that they are ready for the next stage of teaching. We also begin teaching early socialization steps.
By this stage, your child will be running to the learning environment and welcoming people who are teaching them. The emphasis is on teaching your child to ‘learn to learn’, and on strengthening their natural abilities as well as creating new ones.
Skills which cannot be taught in the Natural Environment, such as harder receptive and intraverbal skills, visual skills and beginning academics if they are appropriate, will be taught during Intensive Table Trials (ITT).
During Natural Environment Teaching, our children will begin to answer intraverbal questions according to an item’s feature function or class (”what says miaow?”, “what has wheels?”). They will also begin to answer rote learned WH questions, such as “what do we eat for breakfast?”. Your child will be taught to spontaneously label items that are in their environment, and their length of utterance will begin to increase.
The key to teaching intermediate level learners is that we condition attention to become reinforcing. Our learners will find attention fun, and will be able to say things such as, “look at me, mummy”, “listen to this”, and “look”. This is key to having conversations under the same controlling variables as we do, rather than being taught them in a rote fashion.
Typical eye contact will soon be taught.
Now that your child finds attention naturally reinforcing, and seeks it out, we will begin to teach advanced conversations.
Here, your child will learn to request information in the form of where, when, who, how, which, what and why. You will also be taught to teach your child how to ask can and do questions, such as “can butterflies swim?” and “do dogs fly?”. Verbal Behaviour Consultants will teach your child to acquire a natural motivation for information, rather than to simply regurgitate learned phrases when he or she sees an item. The latter is not true Verbal Behaviour.
Our children will be taught to answer advanced WH questions here, pertaining to their environment. For example, they will be taught to answer “how did you get up that tree yesterday?”, “what did you see when we went to the aquarium last week?”, “who is coming next weekend?”
Once our learner is at the advanced level, he or she will be taught to tell stories, ask for future events and be taught the other skills necessary to hold true conversations and hold their own in the playground and work place. Advanced social skills will be taught to our children at this level.
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