A study was undertaken in an effort to develop techniques for monolingual speech pathologists in the Boston public schools to assess whether language behavior of Cape Verdean immigrants is due to language learning disabilities or simply to language differences. The following three questions were addressed: (1) What are some of the differences between Cape Verdean Creole and English? (2) Are these differences reflected in traditional speech and language tests? and (3) Will presentation of tests in English and Creole enhance the child's performance? A native speaker of Creole provided information about the Cape Verdean culture and translated the Test for Auditory Comprehension of Language, which was then administered to a small group of native Creole-speaking immigrant children, some of whom were language-disabled, and the results were compared with a series of predictions. The findings suggest that this test is a viable clinical procedure for monolingual examiners assessing language performance of nonnative English speaking children, and are being used to establish more appropriate levels of expectation for the performance of Cape Verdean Creole speaking children on the test. The specific language differences between English and Creole that were identified are generalized to other types of tests in the educational setting. (MSE)