This paper describes the development and use of language training procedures, referred to as cues-pause-point procedures, that rely on behavioral principles and simple and natural teaching procedures and that are exhibited in many normal parent-child or teacher-student verbal interactions. The procedures have been effective in teaching severely language deficient and language-disordered individuals with a wide variety of speech problems, including immediate and delayed echolalia, perseverative or tangential speech, nonsensical or unrelated speech, and virtually no speech. The procedures teach individuals to provide functional verbal responses to trained verbal input (i.e., to say "fine" when asked how are you); they also provide an interactive communication strategy that increases the likelihood of appropriate responses to untrained or novel verbalizations. The main goal is to produce the appropriate verbal response quickly so that the major training focus can be on maintaining it through a series of fading steps. A case study is presented of a severely mentally handicapped boy who was trained to respond to five stimulus-response pairs in a particular setting and was able to generalize his skill to other settings and to maintain his new communicative strategy. (JDD)