Described in this report is a longitudinal study that examined the transition that children make from oral to written texts in respect to their use of cohesive devices and particular story structure elements in two modes of oral and one mode of written language. The first section provides an overview of the study and discusses literacy development, while the next section discusses the selection of subjects (72 urban and suburban children in kindergarten through grade two), data collection procedures, coding preparations, cohesion coding and analyses, and story structure coding and analyses. The results of the coding analysis are discussed in the third section, which is followed by a section reviewing the results of the story structure analysis. Conventions of print are discussed in the fifth section, which is followed by a section reviewing three related studies. The report concludes with a description of a case study of one boy's struggle to write. Appendixes include (1) a sentence repetition test of standard English, (2) a modified index to status characteristics, (3) retelling procedures, (4) dictation procedures, (5) illustrative written text, (6) illustrative parsed typescript, (7) original typescript, (8) definitions and procedures for coding proppian functions, (9) supplementary MANOVA and ANOVA tables, and (10) text length and syntactic complexity results and discussion. (HOD)