"Hard in Chicago and Mississippi Too": Resistance to Northern Racism as Debated in Great Migration-Era Chicago Blues

This article investigates representations of racism in electric blues songs from 1945 to the early 1960s. During the Great Migration, more than six million African Americans relocated from the Southern United States to the North and West, primarily seeking these regions’ abundant industrial jobs and freedom from the South’s segregationist laws. However, while the urban North was ostensibly more socially liberal than the South, it concealed unique manifestations of racism that proved difficult for Southerners to traverse. The post-WWII period also saw the development of the North into the epicentre of the blues music industry. Songs created by musicians who were migrants often demonstrate the tactics migrants used to navigate the forms of discrimination specific to the urban North. To examine this topic, I firstly detail previous historiography on electric blues in this era. As modern discourse has increasingly acknowledged the ideological diversity apparent in Black communities, I advance this discussion by exploring factors that limited musical freedom. In doing so, I identify distinct agents of oppression in Chicago that challenged migrants to the region. In analysing blues songs by artists who had migrated to Chicago, this investigation studies not only lyrical information, typically the main focus of blues scholarship, but also musical features to elucidate the strategies these performers propose for resisting Northern racism. The methods suggested vary significantly due to the differing historical and personal circumstances influencing these musicians’ experiences with Northern oppression. The communicative approaches these performers used were additionally impacted by the expectations of their record labels and audiences. These factors allow the genre to contain a range of views, demonstrating its position as a forum to debate how migrants navigated and defined themselves within their new environment

Economic Freedom and Fiscal Performance: A Regression Analysis of Indices of Economic Freedom on Per Capita GDP

This paper explores whether different forms of economic freedom drive fiscal performance. We also seek to determine which specific measurements of economic freedom have the most statistically significant impacts. Though the results of our analysis show that economic freedom does impact levels of per capita GDP, the interpretation of these results is more complicated. Because some indices of economic freedom have negative effects on per capita GDP or are statistically insignificant, it is important to note that simply generally increasing a country’s overall level of economic freedom will not necessarily spur economic growth or increase fiscal performance. This paper does not seek to argue for or against the neo-liberal tradition, but rather provide an additional body of analysis that proves useful in analyzing economic relationships

Electoral reform in Asia: institutional engineering against "money politics"

This paper argues that the concept of intraparty competition – as opposed to interparty competition – provides the most useful lens through which to understand recent cases of electoral reform in East Asia. Various democracies in the region have over the past two decades replaced ‘extreme’ systems on the intraparty dimension with more moderate types. Pressure for reform built up as these systems were increasingly blamed for a number of social ills, such as "money politics" and economic mismanagement. The paper will conclude by arguing that the effect of electoral reform has been rather limited. In particular, particularistic strategies of voter mobilization – such as clientelism and vote buying – remain an important electoral tool for many politicians

New and not so new methods for assessing oral communication

The assessment of oral communication has continued to evolve over the past few decades. The construct being assessed has broadened to include interactional competence, and technology has played a role in the types of tasks that are currently popular. In this paper, we discuss the factors that affect the process of oral communication assessment, current conceptualizations of the construct to be assessed, and five tasks that are used to assess this construct. These tasks include oral proficiency interviews, paired/group oral discussion tasks, simulated tasks, integrated oral communication tasks, and elicited imitation tasks. We evaluate these tasks based on current conceptualizations of the construct of oral communication, and conclude that they do not assess a broad construct of oral communication equally. Based on our evaluation, we advise test developers to consider the aspects of oral communication that they aim to include or exclude in their assessment when they select one of these task types

The effects of item preview on video-based multiple-choice listening assessments

Multiple-choice formats remain a popular design for assessing listening comprehension, yet no consensus has been reached on how multiple-choice formats should be employed. Some researchers argue that test takers must be provided with a preview of the items prior to the input (Buck, 1995; Sherman, 1997); others argue that a preview may decrease the authenticity of the task by changing the way input is processed (Hughes, 2003). Using stratified random sampling techniques, more and less proficient Japanese university English learners (N = 206) were assigned one of three test conditions: preview of question stem and answer options (n = 67), preview of question stem only (n = 70), and no preview (n = 69). A two-way ANOVA, with test condition and listening proficiency level as independent variables and score on the multiple-choice listening test as the dependent variable, indicated that the amount of item preview affected test scores but did not affect high and low proficiency students’ scores differently. Item-level analysis identified items that were harder or easier than expected for one or more of the conditions, and the researchers posit three possible sources for these unexpected findings: 1) frequency of options in the input, 2) location of item focus, and 3) presence of organizational markers

A real interlocutor in elicitation techniques: does it matter?

This study investigates whether adding a real interlocutor to elicitation techniques would result in requests that are different from those gathered through versions with a hypothetical interlocutor. For this purpose, a written method is chosen. One group of 40 students receive a written discourse completion task (DCT) with two situations that ask respondents to write emails on paper to an imaginary professor. This data is compared to earlier data collected from 27 students, where a group of students composed emails for the same situations and sent them electronically to their professor. Thus, while one group write emails to a hypothetical professor, the other group is provided with a real interlocutor. The data is analyzed for the inclusion of opening and closing moves, density, the level of directness and the choices of moves in the opening and closing sequences, as well as the choices of supportive moves. Results indicate significant differences in (the) level of directness, and the choices of moves in the opening and closing sequences. The other analyses do not show significant differences. The findings reveal that the addition of a real interlocutor does make a difference, albeit not a drastic one. The results have implications for the design of elicitation techniques that aim to simulate real life