Developing Component Skills for Conversational Language: Identification by Function, Feature, and Class

Prerequisite- Participants MUST have prior knowledge of the ABLLS, a strong command of the verbal operants, and experience using research-based teaching procedures.

This one-day workshop is designed to prepare staff, related personnel, and parents to begin teaching students with autism and other developmental disabilities fundamental skills that will later serve, in part, as the basis for conversation. Specifically, participants will learn to teach students to identify familiar items given their functions, features, and classes.

Participants will be given information and hands-on experience in the following areas:

• Distinguishing between RFFC, TFFC, and IFFC language classifications
• Prerequisite skills necessary for beginning an FFC program
• Guidelines for selecting relevant targets
• Protocol for teaching items by FFC
• Procedures to accelerate a student’s ability to generate novel responses and generalize across multiple exemplars
• Various data collection options and organizational strategies
• Generating FFC materials and utilizing the teaching procedures with feedback from the presenters