The effectiveness of incidental teaching to teach functional communication skills via paraprofessionals to children with autism spectrum disorder

The purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of incidental teaching strategies to teach functional communication skills via paraprofessionals to children with autism spectrum disorder at preschool age. Besides, this study investigated the generalization of these required skills to different environments, people and materials, maintenance of the skills that were taught even after the end of implementation of these killls and the opinions of teachers and mothers of the students on this study. One girl, three boys, total of four students with autism spectrum disorder at preschool age who attend a rehabilitation center in the city of İstanbul participated in this study. One of the students is determined as substitute. Three students were taught three functional word pairs each; ((1) to take, to give, to open, (2) to pull out, to come, to hold, (3) to remove, to let go, to bring) by three different paraprofessionals. One of the single subject research methodologies, multiple probe with probe trials design across skills, was used in this research. The results of the study demonstrated us that children acquired functional words successfully at a short time period with incidental teaching strategies when provided by the paraprofessionals. Additionaly, the findings showed that the new functional words were acquired, generalized to different materials, environments and people and maintained by the children with autism spectrum disorder after the intervention. The findings obtained from the interviews held with the teachers and the parents demonstrated that their opinions towards incidental teaching were positive. They tought that this procedure was effective on their children's language acquisition.