The symposium from which these papers are gathered was one component of the Assessment of Bilingual Persons Project to pursue research on the nature of language proficiency and to keep teachers informed of related assessment issues for classroom assessment improvement. The papers include: "A Sociolinguistic/Discourse Approach to the Description of the Communicative Competence of Linguistic Minority Children" (Adrian Bennett and Helen Slaughter); "Linguistic Repertoires, Communicative Competence and the Hispanic Child" (Flora Rodriguez-Brown and Lucia Elias-Olivares); "Intergenerational Variation in Language Use and Structure in a Bilingual Context" (Shana Poplack); "Studying Puerto Rican Children's Informal Education at Home" (Evelyn Jacob); "An Ethnographic Approach to Bilingual Language Proficiency Assessment" (Susan U. Philips); "Teacher Training and Ethnographic/Sociolinguistic Issues in the Assessment of Bilingual Students' Language Proficiency" (Carmen Simich-Dudgeon and Charlene Rivera); and "An Anthropological Linguistic Perspective on Uses of Ethnography in Bilingual Language Proficiency Assessment" (Muriel Saville-Troike). Articles were also indexed by subject. The document includes several pages supplying background to the symposium, and an introduction which presents the rationale for selection of papers to be included in this volume. (MSE)