A study of some features of the language usage of nonnative English speakers focused on global communicative competence and the use of text-building devices. Subjects were the primary-school-age children of eight native Italian-, Greek-, and Macedonian-speaking migrant parents and a matched set of native-English-speaking classmates. The language corpus consisted of verbally elicited completions of several narratives. The native English-speaking children's (ES) texts were compared with the nonnative English speakers' (NES) texts for the identification of or reference to characters in the context of discourse cohesiveness. It was found that in telling stories, the language usage of the two groups was similar in many respects but different in detail, with greater NES use of the nominal referential form, suggesting a greater hearer orientation. NES subjects also introduced more characters, effected character changes more frequently, and used the connective "and" more often. ES subjects used more pronominal reference and showed a greater sense for contemporary adolescent usage in Australia. The results suggest that: bilingual children need more help in learning standard morphosyntactical forms and attaching appropriate meanings to lexical items; monolingual children should have greater exposure to second languages; and Australian education should not be based on a monolingual perspective. (MSE)