Assessment of Integrated Skills

The assessment of integrated skills combines two or more skills in the assessment of language ability, such as reading‐into‐writing or listening–reading–speaking. These tasks have garnered increasing attention since the early 2000s with their adoption in several large‐scale assessments and with approaches to language teaching that focus on content or tasks, rather than skills. Since this time, multiple types of integrated assessments have appeared with regular use, along with ongoing development of new ways to elicit integration. Research has investigated many questions about these tasks, starting with how they differ from single skill assessments to more nuanced studies of test takers' processes as they complete the tasks or raters' reactions in scoring them. The benefits of these integrated assessments must be weighed carefully with the challenges they present for test development and rating or scoring exams. However, as studies increasingly provide evidence to support the claims made from these tasks, the case is being built for their validity as valuable assessments of academic language.