Integrating Listening and Speaking Skills

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Research Summary: Can integrated skills tasks change students’ use of learning strategies and materials? A case study using PTE Academic integrated skills items
Dr. Wei Wei
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Vietnam Campus
January 2013
Introduction
This study aims to investigate the influence of the integrated skills tasks on students’ use of language learning strategies and choices of materials before and after the introduction of the integrated skills tests. The integrated skills tasks used in this study are items from the Pearson Test of English Academic
(PTE Academic), comprising two item types: ‘Retell Lecture’ and ‘Repeat
Sentence’. The Official Guide to PTE Academic (Pearson, 2010) states that the
‘Retell Lecture’ item is designed to assess candidates’ ability to “give a presentation on information from a lecture on an academic subject” (2010,
p.51), while the ‘Repeat Sentence’ item tests candidates’ ability “to understand and remember a sentence, then repeat the sentence exactly as you hear it using the correct pronunciation” (2010, p.41). Both of the item types assess speaking and listening skills in an integrated fashion.
Research design
The research question for this study is: can the new integrated skills test change candidates’ use of learning strategies and learning materials? Three classes of students from the School of English Education in Xi’an International
Studies University in China participated in this study. One class (n=31) served as the control group, while the other two classes (n=58) served as the experimental group. All of the students had just completed their Test for English
Major Band 4 (TEM-4) and a university based speaking test.
The Test
The main differences between TEM-4 listening tasks, the university speaking test and the PTE Academic new

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