Using stimulus equivalence procedures to teach English to parents in the Latino community

Abstract

A lack of English proficiency in the Latino community living in America has great repercussions, especially in communication between family members and education or health care providers. Latin parents are left to rely on their children to act as translators when communicating with their teachers or school personnel. Furthermore, Latino parents often have a limited understanding of the U.S. school system, curriculum, and what they are entitled to as parents. Latin-American parents could benefit from learning specific education-related terms to better understand the education system. Stimulus equivalence is a behavioral technique that can be applied to language learning and target these specific terms. This study worked with Latin-American parents with a lack of English proficiency in education-related terms such as national education initiatives. Six education-related terms were selected and two participants were tested and trained for relations among the stimuli through match-to-sample procedures. Stimuli were presented in five different categories: name, acronym, picture, English definition, and Spanish definition, creating a total of twenty possible relations. Results showed the emergence of 9 and 11 relations, while only two to four were explicitly taught to the two participants. This adds to the literature on stimulus equivalence and demonstrates the effectiveness of using stimulus equivalence procedures to teach language to parents in the Latino community.