This paper examines language development of Samoan students in bilingual contexts in Aotearoa, New Zealand. In the absence of valid and standardized assessments tools in Samoan, one was designed to test reading comprehension and oral language development for Samoan students using common narratives as a base. For reading comprehension, the tool used a listening comprehension format to avoid possible decoding limitations and provided a gradient of difficulty with a surprising drop in both oral and reading comprehension at year 7. This drop was attributed to a change in competencies of some students entering the bilingual classroom at year 7. For example, the mixed levels of both L1 (Samoan) oral and L1 (Samoan) reading comprehension within and across years of schooling likely reflects the varied provision in the Samoan bilingual classes and the variations across cohorts in different degrees of bilingualism. We argue that this might be due to the make up of the two schools of which one was an Intermediate school of years 7 and 8 students and, the other was a full primary school with students from years 4 to 8. The patterns suggest two general instructional needs in Samoan bilingual classrooms. One is the need to develop metacognitive components and the need for deliberate and explicit instruction to build awareness of strategies and effectiveness. The other is the ubiquitous need identified in reading comprehension instruction generally to develop vocabulary both through oral and written forms. There was a highly significant relationship between L1 oral at L1 reading comprehension levels reflecting a general relationship found in other studies of monolingual in L2 (English) contexts. (Contains 4 tables and 4 footnotes.)