A topical issue at the moment is the testing of integrated skills. To what extent does IELTS do this?
IELTS (International English Language Testing System), and its predecessor ELTS, has always tested all four skills – listening, reading, writing and speaking. Scores have always been reported on a common 9-band scale. Profile scores on the four modules are reported separately and also contribute equally to an overall band score. Although each module focuses on a particular skill, and reports a score indicating the candidate’s ability in that skill, test tasks often involve using other skills and are thus ‘integrated’ to some degree. This is most apparent in the Speaking module where information which is read or heard helps shape the candidate’s own production.
Originally, ELTS, and IELTS from 1989, strongly supported the integration of skills. In the Writing module candidates were asked specifically to use ideas from one of the reading passages and had access to the text during the module. Likewise part of the Speaking module required candidates to discuss a topic covered in one of the reading passages.
In practice, this gave rise to a number of problems for both students and examiners. Students varied considerably in the use they made of the input. Some borrowed heavily from the texts in their writing or treated the task as a test of their understanding. Others made little or no reference to the texts. Some students tried to make very artificial links between their ideas and those expressed in the texts. Others seemed confused about how they should treat the ‘authoritative’ views expressed.
Such variation in response to the linked tasks made the achievement of fair assessment at the marking stage very difficult. In 1989 the link was removed between the Reading and the Speaking modules and in 1995 the reading-writing link was also removed. Both changes were widely welcomed by teachers and students.
The current Writing and Speaking modules are still integrated – they involve working with data or information provided. However, this is carefully controlled to ensure that the input does not require extensive or complex reading and listening. This is particularly important because a score for each skill is being reported and it would be unfair to candidates if their performance in one skill area was compromised by their ability in another.
Removal of the explicit link between the IELTS Reading, Writing and Speaking modules resulted in a more equitable form of task design. It also made it easier to control comparability of task difficulty across the many different test versions which need to be produced each year to meet the demands of candidature volume and security.
A full discussion of this issue will be included in Volume 19 of the series Studies in Language Testing: IELTS collected papers: Research in speaking and writing assessment, to be published by Cambridge University Press later this year.
What is ‘integrated assessment’?
The term ‘integrated’ is sometimes used to refer to different features or qualities of testing procedures or test tasks. For example, cloze tasks have been described as ‘integrative’ as opposed to ‘discretepoint’.
A more common approach today is to talk about testing ‘integrated skills’. This usually means that completion of a test task involves using more than one macro-skill. So, for example, a speaking or writing task depends upon the test taker processing some associated reading and/or listening input.
The term ‘integrated’ may also be used to suggest that test tasks are similar to ‘real-life’ language activities. This means the content is based on authentic language (however defined), and the task mirrors features of everyday ‘communicative’ language use which the test taker would carry out in a non-test context.
An extension of this idea is that because such tasks are ‘integrated’, they can provide a realistic and useful measure of how well people will communicate in a particular setting (e.g. workplace, academic). A further claim is sometimes made that a test which reflects an ‘integrated approach’ will help test takers prepare appropriately for future success in that particular setting. However, studies have shown that ‘future success’ can depend on many different factors in addition to language proficiency.