As Far As Words Go: Activities for Understanding Ambiguous Language and Humor

This title includes CD-ROM with printable game cards and game board! Understanding ambiguous words, phrases, and sentences is an important part of reading well, communicating skillfully, and enjoying humor based on word play. With this seven-unit activity book - filled with creative, ready-to-use activities based on jokes and puns - students will learn how to decipher the language ambiguities they encounter inside and outside the classroom. Ideal for use with students in the upper elementary grades through high school and beyond, ""As Far As Words Go"" is what speech-language pathologists and education professionals need to: improve students' literacy and communication skills, including semantic, metalinguistic, and pragmatic skills; help students correctly interpret multiple-meaning words and phrases, such as homographs and homophones, idioms and proverbs, and metaphors and similes; teach a wide range of students, especially those who have language or learning disability, or are learning English as a second language; make learning fun with dozens of activities and a printable board game; work with students in small group or one-to-one settings; and, promote development of the skills students need to decode language complexities and humor cues independently when they occur in everyday language. To help professionals use the activities successfully, this book includes enlightening summaries of relevant research, background information on the language concepts, and specific techniques for presenting the activities and helping students generalize new skills in other settings. SLPs and educators will also get the practical content they need to implement the activities and assess student progress (see box).

About the Author :
Cecile Cyrul Spector, Ph.D., has worked in the field of speech-language pathology for more than 35 years. She received her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from Brooklyn College, New York, and her doctoral degree from New York University. She started her career by providing clinical services in public schools, in private practice, and at the Hofstra University clinic. Eventually, she joined the faculty of Long Island University-Orangeburg Campus, where for 10 years she taught a wide range of courses and was the director of the speech-language department. She also taught at Montclair State University and New York University. Cecile has made numerous research presentations and given workshops that have focused on various aspects of humor, ambiguity, figurative language, inferencing, and phonological awareness. Most of her journal articles have been on this same subject matter. As a clinician, Cecile has worked with individuals from 18 months to 80-plus years. Adolescents with language-related learning disabilities and adults who incurred brain injury as a result of strokes or accidents were the populations that sparked her interest in the subtleties of abstract language and cognition. Cecile's previous publications include Just for Laughs: A Game to Improve Language Skills Using Humor (Communication Skill Builders, 1995); Saying One Thing, Meaning Another: Activities for Clarifying Ambiguous Language (Thinking Publications, 1997); Between the Lines: Enhancing Inferencing Skills (Thinking Publications, 2006); and Sounds Like Fun: Activities for Developing Phonological Awareness, Revised Edition (Paul H. Brookes Publishing Co., 2009).

Review :
"The author both teaches us and makes us laugh as she educates the reader about the perplexing language known as English." --Andrea DeBruin-Parecki, Ph.D.