Using Stimulus Equivalence to Teach English to Parents in the Latino Community

A lack of English proficiency in the Latino community living in America has great repercussions in education, access to healthcare, the workplace, and in communication between family members, as well as with education and health care providers. Latin parents are left to rely on their children to act as translators; furthermore, they 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. Six education-related terms were selected and participants were tested and trained for these through match-to-sample procedures. Stimuli were presented in five different modalities: name, acronym, picture, English definition, and Spanish definition, creating a total of twenty possible relations. Results showed the emergence of 4 to 12 relations, while only two to four were explicitly taught. 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.