Narrative observations were made of remedial interchanges occurring among school children (K-4) in open classrooms. Transcripts of interchanges were typed move by move and coded according to a hierarchical coding scheme (remedy, defiance, no response, relief, ending, and ambiguous). The interchanges of the kindergarteners and first graders were examined separately from those of the third and fourth graders in an effort to produce a descriptive grammar that would be capable of generating the move sequence observed at each age. The rule systems of the resulting grammars revealed only minor discrepancies. However, an examination of misses--interchanges not generable by the grammar--proved cogent for a developmental analysis. Furthermore, when all interchanges were parsed according to the grammar, an analysis of frequency of choice of a given move among the grammatical possibilities revealed a number of age differences in selection tendencies. Older children appear as more adversative, and seemingly less mature than younger children. However, by responding to a challenge with a counter-challenge, an older child reveals a readiness to play two roles, a complexity not often seen among young children. More simplistic measures of complexity such as the number of moves per interchange did not change with age. (JB)