This study examined Norwegian seventh graders' English writing, investigating how close their writing in English was to their writing in Norwegian and how levels of performance in second language writing were linked to broader issues (curriculum guidelines, extensive reading, contact time with the target language, and teacher qualifications). Students each wrote a narrative based on a sequence of six pictures. Students wrote about three of the pictures in Norwegian and three in English. The two languages were compared on sentence type, subordination, and noun phrases. Students were able to translate their story grammar from first to second language writing. Most students' writing had not reached the same level of syntactic complexity in English as it had in Norwegian. Despite the fact that Norwegian and English are syntactically similar in regard to subordination and noun phrases, there was a discrepancy between the two languages in this respect. Results highlighted the potential to reach a level of early second language proficiency close to first language proficiency. For example, even though they wrote under time constraints, students produced almost as much English as Norwegian text. The writing of one in four students, in terms of syntactic complexity and idiomaticity, was comparable in the two languages. (Contains 22 references.) (SM)