A planned 3-year joint project of the Nordic research council for the humanities that focuses on writing development in school-age children is described. Four Nordic countries are involved in the project: Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In the study, discourse-level performance analyses of student writing in English as a Second Language are to be undertaken at several different age and skill levels. In the first stage, performance analyses of a small number of texts are used to isolate writing skills variables for further examination. Subjects are students in the second year of secondary school. In the second stage, in-depth analysis of the selected variables is to be performed on a larger, national language corpora. The investigation focuses on several common variables (lexical cohesion, theme dynamics, and connectors), with additional differential analyses in each participating country (for Finland: discourse functions; for Sweden: reference and substitution; for Norway: temporal sequence; for Denmark: pragmatic coherence). In each country, the analysis is performed at four grade levels, varying by country but including late comprehensive, secondary, and higher education. Comparisons are then to be made across countries and grade levels. Norway's study on temporal sequence is described in somewhat greater detail. A 26-item bibliography is included. (MSE)