An analysis of French oral proficiency and guidelines for evaluating and testing the development of such proficiency in learning French as a second language are the keynotes of this dissertation. The speech patterns (structural complexity, rate of production, and hesitation) of three groups of French students with various levels of audiolingual proficiency were compared. This sampling included native English speakers with one university course, native English speakers with two courses, and native French speakers with at least two courses. Oral and visual stimuli consisting of two 1-minute monologs and two black-and-white pictures were presented to the subjects. Conclusions drawn suggest that visual stimuli are more productive than oral stimuli, that evaluation depends on language elements and choice of stimuli, and that testing procedure should be more analytic. The report contains a bibliography and over 100 pages of appendixes which include examples of testing instruments, illustrations on visual stimuli, 21 data tables, and a graph on proposed testing techniques. (DS)