Natural+Language+Instruction

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NATURAL LANGUAGE ASSUMPTIONS 1. Skills taught in natural contexts are more likely to generalize than those taught in artificial ones. 2. Interventions should take advantage of the child's interests. 3. Interventions should attend to the functions of communication, not just the forms of communication 4. Provide meaningful responses to the child's language. 5. Labeling emotions as they occur helps connect the label to the feeling.

TWO MODELS While there are many different types of natural language intervention, they can essentially be broken down into two types: 1. Those that use prompting 2. Those that do not use prompting

SETTING UP THE CONTEXT OF A NATURAL LANGUAGE SESSION 1. The child has to be interested and motivated to communicate. There must be a variety of toys/materials to play with during natural language sessions, but they must not be so new to the student that the child is only spending time exploring new items. 2. You need to arrange the environment so you have some control over the materials, have motivating items that the child wishes to play with during the session, and have a variety of materials. 3. You need to be able to develop play routines.

ENVIRONMENTAL ARRANGEMENT DURING NATURAL LANGUAGE SESSIONS Choose toys and materials of interest to the child. The materials must: 1. Be developmentally appropriate for cognitive, motor, and play skills. 2. You must be able to use the materials as an anchor for language targets. 3. Materials can be structured and arranged to promote the student requesting (manding) the items. 4. Materials can be used to build routines or play schemes. 5. You can adapt toys and activities to fit the child's interests and abilities.

See Responsive Interaction in Natural Language sessions

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