Foreign language testing in schools has followed the general trends of foreign language education, from teaching and testing grammar, through a combination of reading and translation, to the audio lingual approaches of the sixties and the developments since that time. Contemporaneous with the decline in foreign language programs in the 1970's there has been an increase in the number and quality of programs and testing approaches outside schools and universities. Procedures such as the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) Language Proficiency Interview have been designed to evaluate performance in real life situations, but they are not widely used in foreign language or bilingual education. Consideration of issues such as realistic expectations of academic foreign language courses of study, needs of bilingual students, strings attached to government funding in terms of teaching people to communicate in languages other than their native language point out the need for valid and practical measurement tools. They also indicate the need to tailor the assessment measures to realistic objectives, not to the nearly impossible goal of mastery of four language skills in a high school foreign language course. They demonstrate the need to develop among foreign language and bilingual teachers testing expertise. (AMH)