An overview of contemporary assessment practices often used with Latino students is provided, and it is maintained that these practices often overlook the influence of culture and linguistic proficiency on cognitive performance. A new approach, the Sentence Verification Technique (STV), is proposed as an alternative method to assess the linguistic proficiency of language minority populations. The STV, developed as a technique for measuring reading and listening comprehension, requires the student to develop one of four types of test sentences from each sentence appearing in a test passage. The four sentence types include: copying an original sentence, paraphrasing a sentence, changing the meaning of a sentence, and constructing a distractor sentence that is similar in vocabulary and syntactic structure to the sentences in the passage but unrelated in meaning. The effective application of the STV in a transitional bilingual education program in Holyoke, Massachusetts, is described, and the future needs and directions of linguistic proficiency assessment of Latino students are discussed. (DJD)