Exploring the relationship of organization and connection with scores in integrated writing assessment

Traditionally, second language writing assessment has employed writing tasks that require only a single skill; however, in many academic contexts, writing requires the integration of several abilities, including reading and listening. To improve authenticity, integrated tasks are increasingly used in the research and assessment of second language writing. Scholars have proposed discourse synthesis as an underlying construct for these tasks. This study investigated performances on integrated reading-listening-writing tasks to consider how organization and connection, subprocesses in discourse synthesis, are reflected in scores. Four hundred eighty responses to an integrated writing prompt were analyzed for organizational patterns, coherence, and cohesion in relation to test scores. Raters coded essays for type and appropriateness of organization and coherence quality, while computational analysis was used to look at cohesion features. The results indicate that organization and coherence were related to writing score, with quality improving as score increased. However, the cohesion markers analyzed in this study yielded no statistical differences across the score levels.