The mediation roles of independent reading and independent listening skills in the relationship between independent writing and integrated writing skills

Traditionally, the language assessment only required students to employ a single skill in the test (i.e., listening, reading or writing), however, multiple skills are usually employed simultaneously in many circumstances of daily life. Therefor the integrated language tasks are being increasing used in both Chinese (e.g., AP Exams of America) and English language test for L2 learners (e.g., TOEFL).
As one types of integrated tasks, integrated writing task requires students to compose an essay for a communicative purpose after reading or/and listening some given materials. Existing research have concluded that integrated writing is a multiple-dimensional construct (e.g., Sawaki, Quinlan, and Lee, 2013), but a further question is thus raised: What is the relationship between independent skills (i.e., reading, listening and writing) to integrated writing skills? For this question, existing research have found some inclusive connections between them form bivariate correlation analysis, however, based on the close connection between some independent skills (e.g., reading and listening, reading and writing), we should consider the possibility of mediation roles of independent skills when studying this topic.
The term of mediation implies a situation where the effect of a predictor could impose effect on the outcome variable through its influence to a third mediator variable. In our study, we were particularly interested in exploring the mediation roles of independent listening (IL) and reading skills (IR) in the relationship of independent writing to integrated writing skills.
A total of 102 college year 1 students in Hong Kong completed three independent tasks (i.e., listening, reading and writing) and one integrated listening-reading-writing task among. Their performance on these tasks were used for statistical analysis. The results showed that while all three independent skills significantly correlated with integrated skill, independent writing accounted for the most portion of variance of performance on integrated writing task. Moreover, independent reading not only uniquely mediated the relationship between independent writing and integrated writing, but also sequentially influenced listening and thus influenced the performance on integrated writing.
This study provided new evidences to understand the structural relationship between independent skills and integrated skills. Although contextualized in a L1 classroom, its findings would also shed lights to the teaching and learning of Chinese as second language. Copyright © 2018 National Taiwan Normal University.