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Generalizability of writing scores has always been a longstanding concern in L2 writing assessment. A number of studies have been conducted to investigate this topic during the last two decades. However, with the introduction of new test methods, such as reading-to-write tasks, generalizability studies need to focus on the score accuracy of different task types. The current study attempts to examine how reading-to-write tasks are compara ble to independent tasks in terms of score generalizability. To look into this issue, 115 Egyptian university students were asked to write on two independent tasks and two reading-to-write tasks. The essays were holistica lly scored by three raters, who received training prior to scoring. The study design followed a fully crossed univariate design (p × t × r), and consequently GENOVA (Crock & Brennan, 1983) was used to analyze the results. Results showed that the reading-to-write tasks yielded as reliable scores as independent tasks. In addition, the result indicated that score generalizability is very low when using one writing task due to the large (pt) variance component. Implications and limitations of the study are presented.

As a growing number of testing programs use integrated writing tasks, more validation research is needed to inform stakeholders about score use and interpretation. The current study investigates the relationship between writing proficiency and discourse features in an integrated reading-writing task. At a Middle Eastern university, 136 undergraduate students completed a reading-based writing task. The essays were holistically scored by two raters and then classified into three proficiency levels. In addition, the essays were analyzed for a number of discourse features, including fluency, lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, verbatim source use, and direct and indirect source use. A one-way analysis of variance was employed to look into the relationship between writing proficiency and the discourse features of interest. The results yielded significant differences across proficiency levels for a number of discourse features. Nonetheless, follow-up comparisons indicated that the differences were greater between the lowest level and the two upper levels. As for the upper levels, no statistically significant differences were found between these two levels for most of the discourse features. The implications of the study suggest that the selected discourse features play a major role at lower levels, whereas other textual features, such as cohesion, content, and organization, are more critical at higher level writing. The results also support the need in a construct of integrated writing for the inclusion of reading proficiency and knowledge about discourse synthesis.