Source text use in Celpe-Bras’s listening to write tasks

The Certificado de Proficiência em Língua Portuguesa para Estrangeiros (Celpe-Bras) assesses proficiency in Portuguese through integrated tasks. In this article, I analyze Celpe-Bras’s listening to write tasks, focusing on how candidates from the 2018 edition use information drawn from the oral source texts. Fifty-four texts produced by twenty-seven participants in response to Tasks 1 and 2 were collected and qualitatively analyzed. The results indicate that participants across all score bands analyzed use information from the oral source texts, with a gradual increase in both the frequency and the relevance and quality of this use as assigned scores rise. Direct use through copying was not recurrent, unlike indirect use, especially through close paraphrases of the original text, which appeared even in higher-scoring texts. This study contributes to the field of language assessment by expanding knowledge about the Celpe-Bras exam and by addressing a topic that has been little explored in Brazilian research: integration style.