Resources Needed to Expand the Program for Teaching Verbal Repertoires Toward Sentences

Large-scale assessments of students in the early years of basic education in Brazil show a rudimentary level of reading comprehension, requiring the development of instructional and procedural resources to meet this need. This chapter presents an operational description of verbal behaviors based on their control relations and how they can be related by equivalence. Stimulus selection, vocalizing, and transcription behaviors can be placed under the control of both smaller textual units (e.g., letters and syllables) and longer units (e.g., words, sentences, and short texts). In the context of the curriculum for teaching reading and writing “Learning to Read and Write in Small Steps” (Aprender a Ler e Escrever em Pequenos Passos [ALEPP]) via equivalence-based instruction, subdivided into modules of different complexities (e.g., regular words, words with spelling difficulties, and small texts), the chapter introduces sentences as the unit of analysis. In teaching sentences of the same syntax, words with the same ordinal function (i.e., subjects → verbs → objects) can be recombined generating new sentences. The chapter moves on to identify and describe the resources necessary for programming sentence teaching that includes sequential responses and ordinal control. The indicators of effectiveness, efficiency and generality were described from previous studies with different populations.