Bilingual Functional Communication Training

Evaluating the Effects of Codeswitching on the Resurgence of Challenging Behavior in Bilingual Children with Disabilities

Tennessee Association for Behavior Analysis Annual Conference, 2020

 

Abstract: Little research has highlighted how evidence-based practices (e.g., functional communication training [FCT]) might be adapted to meet the needs of children with disabilities from bilingual families. In this study, we served two children with disabilities and challenging behavior whose parents primarily spoke Spanish at home, and whose teachers primarily spoke English at school. Following traditional FCT (i.e., one language only), we systematically replicated the findings of Neely et al. (2019) by demonstrating that functional communication responses (FCRs) in the untrained language (i.e., English) did not emerge when trained FCRs (i.e., Spanish) contacted extinction in alternative-language contexts. Simultaneously, challenging behavior consistently resurged.  We then explicitly trained both children in both languages, and taught them to change the language of request when initial attempts were unsuccessful (i.e., “repair the message” training). After the dual-language training package was implemented during intervention, these same children successfully obtained near optimal rates of reinforcement in both language contexts and challenging behavior did not resurge.