Methods to contextualize tests in the four skill areas of listening, reading, writing, and speech are described. The roles of grammatical and lexical cues, recording semantic details, cloze adaptation, comprehensive questions, logical continuation items, global classification, and sociolinguistic factors are examined in relation to test formats. Various levels of grammatical and lexical specificity are illustrated and mixed skill items are discussed. Ideas for oral proficiency testing including interviews based on the ACTFL/ETS Rating Scales are provided. Following the description of item types, concrete suggestions for creating tests are offered. It is noted that because the contextualized tests integrated many linguistic and lexical features in a few well chosen contexts, the creation of the test is simpler than when instruction contains unrelated items. Several examples of hour-long unit exams for college French and Spanish courses are presented. (RW)