Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 98

The current interest in the profession for integrating skills for assessment resides in their apparent authenticity. Particularly for specific purposes, such as assessing academic language, needs analyses of language use have shown that skills are used in tandem rather than in isolation (e.g., Leki & Carson, 1997). Thus, including this integration as part of assessment creates test tasks that appear authentic in view of their alignment with real language‐use contexts. The connection between the test and the real world is intended to result in a positive impact on test users' confidence in the scores, increase test takers' motivation, and lead to scores that are more predictive of future performance. Integrated assessments that provide test takers with content or ideas for their performances may mitigate nonlanguage factors such as creativity, background knowledge, or prior education, or a combination of these (Read, 1990). Some research has reported that test takers prefer integrated tasks because they understand the task topic better than they do on single skill tasks and may generate ideas from the sources given (Plakans, 2009). However, Huang and Hung (2013) found that actual performance and anxiety measures did not support test takers' perceptions that integrated tasks lower anxiety in comparison with independent speaking tasks.

Another advantage with this kind of assessment is the emphasis on the skills working together rather than viewing them as individual components of language ability. Integrated assessment may fit well with current language‐teaching approaches, such as task‐based language teaching (TBLT), which move away from teaching separate skills to focusing on accomplishing tasks using language holistically. Such tests may also have a positive washback, or impact, on classrooms that integrate skills, focus on content and language integrated learning (CLIL), or have goals for specific‐purposes language use.