Lack of emphasis on oral aspects of language in the Irish Leaving Certificate foreign language examinations has long been considered by teachers to be the chief reason for their inability to implement the aims of modern language teaching in Ireland. These aims are stated in the Department of Education's "Rules and Programme for Secondary Schools" 1977/1978. It was decided to try to devise an oral examination which could be used for Leaving Certificate French examinations. Such tests need to: (1) be simple to administer, (2) be capable of administration to each candidate in a reasonable time, (3) show reasonable consistency when used by many examiners, (4) use objective methods of assessment, and (5) encourage more emphasis on oral-aural skills in foreign language teaching. The report covers preliminary study and testing, preparation for pre-testing, examiners' feed-back, inter-rater reliability, the pre-test, comments of examiners and students, development of a final test, item statistics for aural and oral experimental tests together with raw score numbers, and statistics for selected sub-tests and totals in the experimental French oral/aural examination. (Author)