The development, administration, and scoring of a communicative test and its validation with tests of linguistic and sociolinguistic competence in English and Spanish are reported. Correlation with measures of home language use and school achievement are also presented, and issues of test validation for bilingual programs are discussed. (MSE)

This study represents several years' work on devising tests to measure children's relative proficiency in two languages or speech varieties. A preliminary oral proficiency test in English and Spanish was administered to 45 bilingual students, of whom 41 took both versions. On the basis of difficulty and significant tendencies, 32 items were…