A coding scheme developed by M. A. K. Halliday and R. Hasan was used in a study that investigated how students in grades 4, 6, and 8 developed meaning within narrative texts. Students, after being presented with a visual stimulus, were asked to describe what was happening and say what happened before and after the picture. Next, an oral assignment closely paralleled the written, with a picture as a stimulus and information concerning role, audience, and setting. Each communication unit in the texts was coded to determine instances of the number of ties per communication unit, cohesive items within the text, type of cohesive tie, distance between cohesive items and the direction of the tie, and presupposed items. Among the findings were the following: (1) at all grade levels, lexical cohesion occurred more frequently in the written narratives than in the oral; (2) for narratives written in grades 4 and 6, lexical cohesion accounted for over 50% of the total number of ties produced; (3) students in grades 4 and 6 used a higher percentage of reference ties in their oral than in their written narratives while students in grade 8 reversed this trend; (4) the percentage of conjunctive ties remained relatively stable throughout the three grades except for a sharp decline in their use in the grade 8 written samples; (5) both substitution and ellipsis occurred infrequently; and (6) the narratives with the highest number of ties per communication unit were produced by eighth graders, while those with the lowest number of ties per communication unit were produced by fourth graders. (HOD)