Assessing Integrated Writing Tasks for Academic Purposes: Promises and Perils

Alister H. Cumming

145 citations0/0 files storedLanguage Assessment Quarterly

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EFL/ESL Teaching and Learning Second Language Acquisition and Learning Discourse Analysis in Language Studies

Abstract

The five studies presented in this special issue offer unique evidence, analyses, and theoretical rationales for assessment tasks that involve writing in reference to information from source material with substantial content. I review the five studies in respect to five “promises” and five “perils,” concluding that, collectively, the promises were mostly fulfilled, but so were most of the perils. The promises are that these task types (a) provide realistic, challenging literacy activities; (b) engage test takers in writing that is responsible to specific content; (c) countertest method or practice effects associated with conventional item types; (d) evaluate language abilities consistent with construction-integration or multiliteracies models of literacy; and (e) offer diagnostic value for instruction or self-assessment. The perils of these task types, however, are that they (a) confound the measurement of writing abilities with abilities to comprehend source materials; (b) muddle assessment and diagnostic information together; (c) involve genres that are ill-defined and so difficult to score; (d) require threshold levels of abilities for competent performance, producing test results that may not compare neatly across different ability levels; and (e) elicit texts in which the language from source materials is hard to distinguish from examinees' own language production.

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2013A closer look at integrated writing tasks: Towards a more focussed definition for assessment purposes 2019MAPPING MASTER’S STUDENTS’ USE OF EXTERNAL SOURCES IN SOURCE-BASED WRITING IN L1 AND L2 2017Evaluating rater accuracy and perception for integrated writing assessments using a mixed-methods approach 2014Assembling validity evidence for assessing academic writing: Rater reactions to integrated tasks 2014What accounts for integrated reading-to-write task scores?

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