DESCRIPTORS Bilingual Students: Classroom Communication; Communication Skills: *Communicative Competence

This paper examines: (1) the use of estions by children at different levels of proficiency in Spanish-44.11iglish, and (21 the congruency between the language constructs &Ad to measure language proficiency and the natural language repertoire of childten as seen in video-tapes of classroom interaction. A quantitative analysis of the data collected on question repertoire indicates that, in general, questions occur more often in the language in which the children are more proficient. The results show no significant difference in the number of questions asked by each child. Discussing measures of language proficiency, it is concluded that a test that measures more than one aspect of language competence is a better predictor of the speakeir's communicative competence than one which is limited to a single aspect of that competence. In addition, the paper concludes that tests currently used to measure language proficiency examine a pects of language use that are irrelevant to children's lingo f_tic performance and fail to take into accounv. most of the richnes f the children's language repertoire. New test constracts for suring language proficiency that are more holistic in nature and th t are based on what children actually do with language need to be eveloped. (JK