There has been an increased emphasis on skills integration in language teaching and assessment. This book reports the results of a unique, large-scale, longitudinal educational action research based on a separate sample pre-test and post-test design conducted to improve the effectiveness of the development of English majors' academic reading ability with a guided summary writing task. The completion of such an integrated task requires reading an input text and the extraction, summarisation, paraphrasing, and writing up of content specified in a guiding question. Questionnaire data subjected to exploratory factor analyses revealed the dimensionality of academic reading ability. Further analyses conducted with the scores awarded to the scripts enriched the findings with informative and practical insights into the reading processes and behaviours elicited with the reading-into-writing task. Given its pedagogical and assessment focus, the book is relevant for applied linguists, English for Academic Purposes materials designers and instructors, and language assessorsespecially test developers.
Gyula Tankó is an associate professor at the Department of English Applied Linguistics at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. He has also taught in upper-primary, secondary, and higher education institutions in Hungary, Italy, Germany, the UK, and Romania. He teaches and researches Language Assessment, English for Academic Purposes, and Mediation Studies at BA, MA, and PhD levels. He has published six books (e.g., the Writing Handbook, in the Into Europe series) and three test specifications (e.g., English for Diplomatic Purposes), edited five books, authored numerous articles, and gave several talks at national and international conferences on language assessment, English for Academic Purposes, as well as mediation and discourse studies. He is the principal researcher in a large-scale Hungarian National Research, Development, and Innovation Office funded assessment justification project (No.: 142536) that investigates the advanced-level English school leaving examination and partly for which the study reported in this book has been conducted.
