Picture Exchange Communication System

The Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS) was developed at the Delaware Autistic Program (DAP) and was designed to teach young children to communicate in a social context (Bondy & Frost, 1994; Frost & Bondy, 2002). Using PECS, learners are taught to give a picture of a desired item to a communicative partner in exchange for the item. There are six phases of PECS instruction, with each phase building on the last.

The phases are:

1. teaching the physically assisted exchange
2. expanding spontaneity
3. simultaneous discrimination of pictures
4. building sentence structure
5. responding to, “What do you want?”
6. commenting in response to a question.
   
   Participants will be able to:

• define Picture Exchange Communication System®
• identify what skills to teach using PECS®
• identify the steps for implementing PECS®
• locate resources.