A study examined the process of change in story development (in contrast to documenting common structures) found in the stories generated by cross-cultural/cross-linguistic students. Subjects, 12 first-grade native English-speaking students in either of two separate school districts and 23 cross-cultural/cross-linguistic students representing the Filipino or Central American cultures enrolled in kindergarten through sixth grades in three separate school districts, were interviewed at the beginning of first grade, the end of first grade, the end of the second grade, and in the fifth or sixth grade. During these interviews, students were asked to tell two stories using different elicitation procedures (oral or finger puppet). Following story transcription, each story was analyzed for the story/language elements. Results indicated that: (1) the elicitation procedures affected students' uses of story sources, plots, and characters; (2) microstructures such as story conventions, clausal connectors, and T-units were stable regardless of elicitation procedure; and (3) the cross-cultural/cross-linguistic students used a wider range of tenses and a greater reliance on relative clauses than native English speakers. (Thirty-five references are attached.) (RS)