Suggestions are made to help the regular classroom teacher maximize instructional time for mainstreamed learning disabled students. Suggestions cover general classroom organization, language arts instruction, and math instruction. Recommendations focus on incidental learning. (CL)

Three young children with borderline to moderate mental retardation were taught the action-object form using milieu language intervention. Subjects learned to generatively produce action-object combinations in nonobligatory conversational situations as requests for objects/actions and as declaratives, and also began to respond correctly to probe…

This study, involving two three-year-olds with mild mental retardation, found that milieu language intervention can directly enhance the acquisition and generative use of lexical and semantic forms used for varied pragmatic functions and that adult systematic commenting and child spontaneous imitation may interact to facilitate the teaching…

Incidental teaching procedures were used to train a 16-year-old mildly handicapped student to use social amenities in a resource classroom. Generalization to another resource room and an art classroom was assessed. Results indicated increased use of social amenities in the training setting and generalization settings. (Author/PB)

Eight students (ages 9-12) with mild mental retardation were instructed in sight-word reading in 2 small groups. Results showed that the time delay procedure was effective, that students learned other students' words through observation, and that students learned some incidental information. (Author/JDD)

This article describes incidental teaching of social behavior, which improves the peer interactions of young children through a naturalistic teaching tactic that can be used separately or along with other social skills interventions. The article offers a rationale, examples of incidental teaching, and helpful hints for implementing the method.…

This study, involving four secondary-age students with moderate to severe mental retardation, found that four response prompting conditions (progressive time delay and the system of least prompts, both with and without a descriptive consequent event) were effective in teaching reading of recipe words with similar efficiency and maintenance. (JDD)

The difficulties hearing impaired students experience in acquiring the conceptual information underlying narratives is discussed in terms of schemata development and the role of incidental learning. Principles for teaching concepts and labels, elaborating the schema, using questions to fill in conceptual gaps, and using imaginary play and…

The study evaluated the effectiveness of teaching three teachers of the severely handicapped to use four modified incidental teaching procedures: (1) giving students opportunities for choice; (2) blocking access to materials or events, (3) placing desired materials out of reach, and (4) offering students objects out of context. (Author/DB)

Three fifth grade students with learning disabilities were taught to recognize multisyllabic basal vocabulary words using constant time delay in a small-group instructional arrangement and were assessed on ability to recognize, spell, and define both their own target words and observational words. The procedure was effective in establishing…

Constant time delay was found to be an effective strategy in teaching targeted facts to four secondary-age students with mild and moderate mental retardation. Students also learned other students' target facts through observation and learned incidental information embedded in the consequent event following correct responding. (Author/JDD)

The effects of analog language teaching and natural language teaching on language generalization and long-term retention in 23 adults with autism and severe/profound mental retardation were examined. Natural language teaching was found to have many strengths and few drawbacks and to produce equal generalization and retention under conditions…

This discussion of speech development in infants and toddlers with hearing impairments considers selection and ordering of speech targets; the place of audition in speech teaching; and teaching methods for specific speech elements. Guidelines include helping caregivers internalize strategies to help the child use residual hearing and utilizing an…

Presents a study of results of training a nursery teacher and nurse in "Incidental Teaching" (IT) procedures designed to encourage child-initiated language interactions in the classroom. Reports increased use of IT by the subjects and in initiation by second-language learning children. Concludes that the number of words used increased…

Incidental teaching of social behavior and friendship activities are naturalistic peer interventions that can be easily incorporated into preschool curricula for children with and without special needs. This article provides a rationale for these two strategies, a 10-step program for implementing incidental social behavior instruction, and…