An Investigation of the Effect of Task Type on the Discourse Produced by Students at Various Score Levels in the TOEFL iBT® Writing Test

Abstract

This study, which forms part of the TOEFL iBT® test validity argument for the writing section, has two main aims: to verify whether the discourse produced in response to the independent and integrated writing tasks differs and to identify features of written discourse that are typical of different scoring levels. The integrated writing task was added to the TOEFL iBT test to “improve the measurement of test-takers' writing abilities, create positive washback on teaching and learning as well as require test-takers to write in ways that are more authentic to academic study” (Cumming et al., 2006, p. 1). However, no research since the study by Cumming et al. (2006) on the prototype tasks has in..