Teaching young children with developmental disabilities to request more play using the behaviour chain interruption strategy

Three young children with developmental disabilities and severe communicati on impairments were taught to request more play using the behaviour chain i nterruption strategy (BCIS). With this strategy, the child's ongoing play b ehaviour is blocked or interrupted to create the need for the child to requ est more. Instruction occurred in the midst of two play routines with probe s conducted to assess generalisation to one other play routine and to the b eginning of the activities. A multiple-baseline across subjects design demo nstrated that the BCIS was effective in teaching two of the three children to request more, Far these two children, generalisation to an untrained pla y activity was also noted. Only one of these children, however, also used t he newly acquired request to initiate play. These results extend previous r esearch on teaching communication skills to children with developmental dis abilities and severe communication impairment by demonstrating the effectiv eness of BCIS in the context of play activities within early intervention p rogrammes. Student characteristics which may predict the effectiveness of t he procedure are discussed.