Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how teachers can use their Sgaw Karen students' names as a means to gaining awareness of their students' home culture, language and personal stories. Design/methodology/approach: This case study uses interviews with four Karen families to explore the meanings behind the names and nicknames given…

Much of what we think we know about the performance of humor relies on our intuitions about prosody (e.g., "it's all about timing"); however, this has never been empirically tested. Thus, the central question addressed in this article is whether speakers mark punch lines in jokes prosodically and, if so, how. To answer this question,…

The thesis of this study is that the secondary school American literature curriculum in a particular region should include the cultural heritage of that region as reflected in its oral literature. In this study, aspects of the growth of a distinctive American humor are traced from colonial times to the present along the eastern seaboard, with…