A Practitioner's Review of Banerjee et al., 2022- Repair the Message

Extending functional communication training to multiple language contexts in bilingual learners with challenging behavior

Findings

Banarajee and her colleagues wrote this article to address a specific problem and literature gap, and I believe they did exactly that. It is something that has gone under the radar for too long, and it is good that it is getting the attention that it deserves. That problem is the heavy English bias in published papers on functional communication training. The majority of papers (with notable exceptions) that conduct functional communication training do not focus on individuals with a culturally diverse language method. This presents a problem for the child learning functional communication. If the therapists teach communication in English, but the family at home speaks Spanish, then how will that child communicate and generalize the skills that are learned. This paper looks at that issue with a naturalistic bent. Specifically, they teach the two participants to  “repair the message” which means change the language from one to the other based on the lack of reinforcement. For example, if a child goes to their Spanish speaking caregiver and requests a break in English, the caregiver will not reinforce it. The child will then “repair the message” and request again in Spanish, thus leading to reinforcement. They did this with a combination of behavioral skills training and massed trails. Opportunities to repair the message were recorded correct over 90% and 55% of the time across the two participants.

Research to Practice

This study can help inform the behavior analytic practitioner in a couple keyways. The first is that treatments need to be naturalistic as possible! Teaching a mand response is typically a crucial step to any behavior reduction strategy. However, sometimes the reinforcement, the methods of communication, and other aspects of the intervention can feel too contrived to generalize. Take inspiration from this study and get naturalistic with your prompting methods! The other takeaway is to not get stuck on teaching one mand modality and call it quits. There are so many advantages of expanding that response class. It is vital for our learners to communicate in different ways. Vocal, sign, different languages, even with pictures, the more ways the better!

Citation

Banerjee, I., Lambert, J. M., Copeland, B. A., Paranczak, J. L., Bailey, K. M., & Standish, C. M. (2022). Extending functional communication training to multiple language contexts in bilingual learners with challenging behavior. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 55(1), 80-100. https://doi.org/10.1002/jaba.883