A closer look at integrated writing tasks: Towards a more focussed definition for assessment purposes

•We review current definitions of integrated writing tasks.•We review integrated writing assessment tasks used.•We argue that the current definition of integrated writing tasks are too vague.•We propose a new definition for integrated writing assessment tasks.

The use of integrated tasks is increasingly common in second language assessment in both high stakes and classroom contexts. However, because of the vague definition of what constitutes an integrated task, the types of tasks included in this area and the assessment of the resulting writing is highly varied. In this paper, we argue for a better definition of the term ‘integrated writing task’. We start by reviewing current definitions available in the literature, discuss the construct underlying integrated tasks and then propose a number of features which we feel need to be present in integrated tasks. We then propose a new, narrower definition of the term. We hope that this will result in better task design, improved assessment outcomes for test takers, more detailed test specifications, better replicability of research and a shared research agenda.