Teaching Generative Reading Via Recombination of Minimal Textual Units: A Legacy of Verbal Behavior to Children in Brazil.

This paper reports results of two studies that sought to teach generative reading skills to a large group of Brazilian children who were exhibiting protracted failure in school. Inspired by Skinner's analysis of verbal relations and minimal verbal units, the methodology took advantage of certain characteristics of Portuguese. Many words in this language are comprised of two-letter syllabic units (e.g., BO+LA= ball, CA+BO= handle, LA+TA= can) that can be recombined to form new words (e.g., BOCA= mouth, BOTA= boot), thus establishing a route to generative reading via recombinative generalization. Such syllabic units were incorporated within curricular framework that used matching-to-sample and learning by exclusion methods to teach matching relations involving pictures, printed and spoken words, and printed and spoken syllables. Study 1 was conducted within a university-based learning center that maintained certain aspects of laboratory conditions. It showed that teaching textual relations between dictated and printed syllables could control procedurally the inter- and intra-participant variability observed in past studies that lacked this feature -resulting in virtually universally positive teaching outcomes. Study 2 was conducted in a public school programs that applied the same basic training methodology. Positive training outcomes in an experimental group were approximately 3-5 times greater than that in a placebo control group. Together, these studies illustrate that the functional analysis in Verbal Behavior is having a direct impact in educational science in Brazil. It has led to procedures that can be effectively translated from the laboratory to the community via delivery systems that can be implemented in the developing world.

Teaching Generative Reading Via Recombination of Minimal Textual Units: A Legacy of Verbal Behavior to Children in Brazil

This paper reports results of two studies that sought to teach generative reading skills to a large group of Brazilian children who were exhibiting protracted failure in school. Inspired by Skinner’s analysis of verbal relations and minimal verbal units, the methodology took advantage of certain characteristics of Portuguese. Many words in this language are comprised of two-letter syllabic units (e.g., BO+LA= ball, CA+BO= handle, LA+TA= can) that can be recombined to form new words (e.g., BOCA= mouth, BOTA= boot), thus establishing a route to generative reading via recombinative generalization. Such syllabic units were incorporated within curricular framework that used matching-to-sample and learning by exclusion methods to teach matching relations involving pictures, printed and spoken words, and printed and spoken syllables. Study 1 was conducted within a universitybased learning center that maintained certain aspects of laboratory conditions. It showed that teaching textual relations between dictated and printed syllables could control procedurally the inter- and intra-participant variability observed in past studies that lacked this feature -resulting in virtually universally positive teaching outcomes. Study 2 was conducted in a public school programs that applied the same basic training methodology. Positive training outcomes in an experimental group were approximately 3-5 times greater than that in a placebo control group. Together, these studies illustrate that the functional analysis in Verbal Behavior is having a direct impact in educational science in Brazil. It has led to procedures that can be effectively translated from the laboratory to the community via delivery systems that can be implemented in the developing world (AU)

El presente trabajo informa de dos estudios para enseñar habilidades generativas de lectura a un amplio grupo de niños brasileños con un historial de fracaso académico con tinuado. Inspirándose en el análisis de las relaciones verbales y de las unidades verbales mínimas llevado a cabo por Skinner, se empleó una metodología que aprovecha ciertas características de la lengua portuguesa. Muchas palabras en esta lengua se componen de unidades silábicas de dos letras (vg. BO+LA= bola; CA+BO= cabo; LA+TA= lata) que pueden recombinarse para formar nuevas palabras (vg. BOCA, BOTA), lo que facilitaría una ruta hacia la lectura generativa a través de la generalización recombinativa. Estas unidades silábicas fueron incorporadas a un marco de trabajo curricular en el que se emplearon métodos de igualación a la muestra y de aprendizaje por exclusión para la enseñanza de relaciones de igualación o emparejamiento entre imágenes, palabras impresas y habladas, y sílabas impresas y habladas. El Estudio 1 se llevó a cabo en un centro de aprendizaje universitario que en parte reunía las condiciones de un laboratorio. Este estudio mostró que enseñar relaciones textuales entre sílabas dictadas e impresas podía servir para controlar la variabilidad inter e intra-participantes observada en estudios anteriores que carecían de este entrenamiento, obteniéndose resultados de aprendizaje positivos generalizados. El estudio 2 se llevó a cabo en una escuela pública, y se empleó la misma metodología básica de entrenamiento que en el primer estudio. Los resultados positivos de aprendizaje del grupo de entrenamiento fueron entre 3 y 5 veces superiores a los de un grupo control placebo. Ambos estudios ilustran cómo el análisis funcional basado en Conducta Verbal está teniendo un impacto directo sobre la ciencia educativa en Brasil. Esta aproximación ha generado procedimientos trasladables de manera efectiva del laboratorio a la aplicación comunitaria en el mundo en vías de desarrollo (AU)