Teaching social language to moderately handicapped students

Three students with moderate handicaps were taught to initiate and expand on conversational topics. The teaching procedure used stimuli generated from actual conversations with nonhandicapped peers. Generalization was assessed by audiotaping conversations between the handicapped students and their peers in natural school contexts without adult supervision. Results indicated that training generalized to natural contexts. These results were socially validated by undergraduate special education students, who rated tapes of two of the students' conversations during training phases as more socially competent than during baseline. Results are discussed in terms of the evaluation of complex social behavior as multioperant behaviors.