"I want sausages for my lunch!" Using functional communication training to enhance choice making behaviour

In a remote village in Negara Brunei Darussalam, a young boy with autism was exhibiting behaviours of concern at lunchtime. This paper describes the process by which the school-based team addressed this situation using prompting as a teaching strategy. An initial junctional analysis indicated that the boy was taking other children's food at lunchtime and that this behaviour was maintained by his peers' compliance. The communicative functions of the child's prelinguistic behaviours were assessed by teacher and parent interview and by direct observation. An intervention using a verbal prompting strategy and functional communication training (FCT) via a simple A-B time series design was designed. Preliminary results indicate that, with training in FCT, a regular class teacher who previously had limited experience with children with special needs was able to interpret a child's behaviour as communicative. This information was then used to design a communication behaviour intervention that was later used to enhance the child's communication skills by teaching a replacement behaviour to the child.