Carol A. Chapelle - The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics

Integrating skills in assessment will benefit from continued investigation as well as creative innovation. It represents an advance from the approach of the past that defined language as four skills plus grammar and vocabulary. Since integration appears in classroom and authentic contexts (Hirvela, 2016), its emergence or reemergence in testing is inevitable. Meanwhile, research must continue to look at the integrated skills construct(s) to better understand how they can best be defined and measured and how scores from assessments of integrated skills can be used.

SEE ALSO:Assessment of Speaking; Assessment of Writing; English for Academic Purposes; Rating Scales and Rubrics in Language Assessment; Task‐Based Language Assessment; Validation of Language Assessments

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8 Gebril, A. (2010). Bringing reading‐to‐write and writing only assessment tasks together: A generalizability analysis. Assessing Writing, 15, 100–17.

9 Gebril, A., & Plakans, L. (2013). Toward a transparent construct of reading‐to‐write tasks: The interface between discourse features and proficiency. Language Assessment Quarterly, 10, 9–27.

10 Gebril, A., & Plakans, L. (2014). Assembling validity evidence for assessment academic writing: Rater reactions to integrated tasks. Assessing Writing, 21, 56–73.

11 Hirvela, A. (2016). Connecting reading and writing in second language writing instruction (2nd ed.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

12 Huang, H. T., & Hung, S. T. (2013). Comparing the effects of test anxiety on independent and integrated speaking test performance. TESOL Quarterly, 47, 244–69.

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17 Plakans, L., & Gebril, A. (2017). Exploring the relationship of organization and connection with scores in integrated writing assessment. Assessing Writing, 31, 98–112.

18 Plakans, L., Liao, J., & Wang, F. (2018). Integrated assessment research: Writing‐into‐reading. Language Teaching, 51, 430–4.

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21 Wang, C., & Qi, L. (2013). A study of the continuation task as a proficiency test component. Foreign Language Teaching and Research, 45, 707–18.

22 Weigle, S. C., Yang, W., & Montee, M. (2013). Exploring reading processes in an academic reading test using short answer questions. Language Assessment Quarterly, 10, 28–48.

23 Wolfersberger, M. (2013). Refining the construct of the classroom‐based writing‐from‐readings assessment: The role of task representation. Language Assessment Quarterly, 10, 49–72.

24 Yang, H. C. (2014). Toward a model of strategies and summary writing performance. Language Assessment Quarterly, 11, 403–31.

25 Yang, H. C., & Plakans, L. (2012). Second language writers' strategy use and performance on an integrated reading‐listening‐writing task. TESOL Quarterly, 46, 80–103.

26 Yu, G. (2008). Reading to summarize in English and Chinese: A tale of two languages? Language Testing, 25, 521–51.

27 Zhu, X., Li, X., Yu, G., Cheong, C. M., & Liao, X. (2016). Exploring the relationships between independent listening and listening–reading–writing tasks in Chinese language testing: Toward a better understanding of the construct underlying integrated writing tasks. Language Assessment Quarterly, 13, 167–85.

1 Doolan, S. M., & Fitzsimmons‐Doolan, S. (2016). Facilitating L2 writers' interpretations of source texts. TESOL Journal, 7, 716–45.

2 Grabe, W., & Zhang, C. (2013). Reading and writing together: A critical component of English for academic purposes teaching and learning. TESOL Journal, 4, 9–15.

3 Kim, A. Y., & Kim, H. J. (2017). The effectiveness of instructor feedback for learning‐oriented language assessment: Using an integrated reading‐to‐write task for English for academic purposes. Assessing Writing, 32, 57–71.

4 Sawaki, Y., Stricker, L. J., & Oranje, A. H. (2009). Factor structure of the TOEFL Internet‐based test. Language Testing, 26(1), 5–30.

5 Yu, G. (2009). The shifting sands in the effects of source text summarizability on summary writing. Assessing Writing, 14, 116–37.

JAMES E. PURPURA AND JEE WHA DAKIN

The sociocultural, economic, and geopolitical forces in education, the workplace, and in our daily lives have significantly increased the linguistic competencies needed to function successfully in today's world. As language users, we need a range of linguistic resources to understand and express propositions for a variety of purposes in written, spoken, and visual forms to interact and cooperate with others. We also need linguistic resources to establish and maintain relationships, and collaborate in multicultural teams, often online. We need linguistic resources to conduct, navigate, and negotiate everyday transactions. And we draw from the same set of resources to process information, analyze it, categorize it, critically evaluate it to reason from evidence, learn, solve problems, and make decisions. In short, the linguistic resources needed to use a second or foreign language (L2) to communicate accurately, meaningfully, and appropriately, while performing tasks that span a variety of topics and contexts, have over the years become increasingly more complex. This complexity in the target of assessment concomitantly presents important challenges for those interested in measuring the L2 linguistic resources needed to communicate in today's world.

To measure the linguistic resources of communication, language testers need a means of defining them. What exactly are linguistic “resources of communication” and how can they be represented? Is a list of grammatical structures that learners need to master an adequate representation for assessment? Are the resources forms that are associated with literal meanings? Are they forms that can vary in meaning depending on the context in which they are used? Or are they an amalgam of independent form‐meaning mappings that conspire to convey propositions in context?