A cross-cultural study of British and United States elementary school children's writing and reading, looking in particular at the comparative growth of syntactic maturity in the two countries as the key to both processes and the link between them, is described in this report. Five hundred sixteen children in 19 classrooms in the Nottingham area of England and in the Kalamazoo, Michigan, area were secured from two socioeconomic levels, with schools in the two areas matching according to level. Two age groups were chosen, children aged 8 and 9 and those aged 10 and 11. All children were given two sentence-combining instruments, and one piece of free writing was collected from each child. Results of the research indicated that the average time spent in writing for British children was nine and one-fourth hours per week against the average for U.S. children of one and one-third hours per week. British children were found superior to U.S. children in syntactic maturity, as evidenced in their writing; upper socioeconomic level was a more important factor in promoting syntactic maturity in British children; British children wrote longer compositions and ones of higher quality; and in both countries reading comprehension percentiles obtained from standardized tests correlated highly with syntactic maturity scores, in spite of the fact that British schools spent little time on reading skill instruction. (MKM)