A study investigated the reliability and validity of the partial dictation test, a combination of dictation and cloze procedure, to measure foreign language listening comprehension. Subjects were 78 students of English as a Foreign Language in the second year of high school in Spain. Students listened to a passage from a commercial reader three times; no pauses were used in the reading. The test was administered in the classroom. The text was brief (268 words), with 30 words deleted. Reliability was tested using five methods, revealing high internal consistency. Measures of content and predictive and concurrent validity were also applied. Results suggest relatively short dictation tests can be constructed to provide useful measures of classroom second language proficiency. Among the practical advantages seen in this adaptation of dictation are ease and speed of scoring and adaptability to program needs and objectives. Further research is recommended on the validity of the procedure, and to determine whether partial dictation can discriminate among different terms in a course, or whether the desirable properties are shown by other dictations based on other text types, scoring and administration procedures, language modalities, segment length, and deletion decisions. A brief bibliography, a copy of the test, and tabulations of results are appended. (MSE)