Communication Intervention on the Playground: A case study on teaching requesting to a young child with autism

This paper describes a playground-based communication intervention for a young child with autism. Opportunities for teaching the child to request more play were created at multiple points on the playground by momentarily interrupting the child's ongoing play using the behaviour chain interruption strategy (BCIS). In addition, probes were conducted to determine if the child would generalise his use of the requesting response to an earlier point in the routine and to a second teacher. There were no correct responses during baseline. With intervention, correct requests increased to a high level after approximately 100 instructional opportunities. This high level of correct requesting was maintained with a new teacher and generalised to an earlier point in the routine (i.e., when he was interrupted while on his way to the playground). The results suggest that the BCIS can be used to provide effective communication intervention on the playground.