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As integrated tasks become more common in assessing writing for academic purposes, it is necessary to investigate how test takers approach these tasks. The present study explores the processes of test takers undertaking reading-to-write tasks developed for a university English placement exam. Think-aloud protocols and interviews of university-level non-native writers of English were collected to capture the writers’ composing processes. These data were analysed to determine if the tasks elicited an academic writing process of discourse synthesis and to identify what language issues were present. The results revealed some writers use discourse synthesis subprocesses in composing responses to the reading-to-write tasks, with apparent d ifferences across writers. Language difficulties that emerged for writers were vocabulary knowledge and use, as well as stylistic concerns. The implications of the study suggest that reading-to-write tasks may elicit a discourse synthesis process that could be used for validity evidence in some contexts and lead to more appropriate placement into academic writing courses.

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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.

Integrated writing tasks that involve different language modalities such as reading and listening have increasingly been used as means to assess academic writing. Thus, there is a need for understanding how test-takers coordinate different skills to complete these tasks. This study explored second language writers' strategy use and its relationship to test performance on an integrated reading-listeningwriting test task using a structural equation modeling approach. The results reveal that integrated writing strategy use was a multifaceted construct consisting of three factors: self-regulatory strategy use (SELFS), discourse synthesis strategy use (DSS), and "test-wiseness" strategy use (TWS). SELFS had an executive control over other types of strategy use. DSS had a direct, positive impact on test performance, and TWS had a direct, negative impact on test performance. The study suggests that the task requires not only comprehension and production abilities, but also regulation skills for managing reading, listening, and writing interactions. The findings provide insight into the nature of integrated reading-listening-writing tasks and contribute to validity arguments for the test. The study has implications for second language academic writing assessment, learning, and instruction.