Free speech samples and aural cloze test scores were collected from 24 Spanish-surnamed children at the beginning of first grade. The children were members of two classrooms, and each class received instruction from a Spanish-speaking bilingual teacher and an English-speaking monolingual teacher. The children were learning to read in Spanish and English. Spanish and English speech samples, which represented stories formulated by the children from picture books without words, were scored for grammaticality, verb tenses and sentence transformations. The scores were subsequently grouped into high, medium and low language control categories. Spanish and English cloze tests, administered in oral form, were scored for exact matching, appropriate synonyms and retention of appropriate syntax or meaning. A high relationship appeared to exist between the ability to perform predicting tasks, such as the cloze, and high control of language. When these language tasks were compared with teachers' estimates of reading success, a similar relationship existed; i.e., children with high or medium control of Spanish or English were more likely to be reading than children with low language control. Those children who showed adequate control in both languages were reading in both languages. Some children with high control in one language were learning to read in both languages. (Author/CFM)