Testing Practices and Construct Operationalisation: Reflections on Cyril Weir’s View of Integrated Assessment Tasks

This chapter presents our review and reflections on Professor Cyril Weir’s
thinking concerning the use of integrated reading/writing tasks (especially
summary writing) at different stages of his academic career, from his PhD
dissertation (1983) to his most recent publications in the Studies in Language
Testing (SiLT) series. Our analysis of his writings as well as his fellow
researchers’ comments on his publications showed that he was initially very
positive about integrated reading/writing tasks in the early 1980s as evidenced
in his PhD dissertation, though he did have some reservations due to the challenges in scoring reliability. However, he became more concerned about the
measurement ‘muddiedness’ of such tasks during the 1990s. Towards the end
of the first decade of the 21st century, he gradually changed his views, and
became again more receptive, optimistic, and eventually advocated enthusiastically in favour of integrated writing tasks. From our analysis we can see the
evolution of his views in the last 35 years on integrated reading/writing tasks,
especially in the context of English for Academic Purposes (EAP) assessment.