Independent and integrated speaking
Brown et al. (2005) published an in-depth study on the development of the TOEFL iBT
speaking tasks. The study included an examination of rater-cognition and a linguistic
analysis of responses to five in-development tasks. The prototype speaking tasks used in
the Brown et al. study included two independent prompts that asked test-takers to provide
their opinion on a particular topic. The speaking tasks also included an integrated
task in which the test-takers listened to a monologic lecture and then were asked to
respond to a related question, a similar integrated task in which the listening sample was
dialogic in nature, and an integrated task in which test-takers read a passage and then
responded to a related prompt. The rater cognition study, which asked experienced ESL
instructors to provide feedback on the quality of task response samples and elaborate on
their reasons for judging a particular sample to be of high or low quality, formed the basis
for the current independent and integrated rubrics used in the scoring of TOEFL iBT
speaking tasks.