Applied Psycholinguistics 8:2 204 Book reviews as well as psychoanalysis - get richly represented, while others are somewhat slighted. The predelictions of the editors, the response rates of the invited au- thors, and many other factors can excuse a certain imbalance. It is odd, though, in a book like this, that "interlanguage" is present while "interaction" is not; that "linguistic backsliding" gets half a column, while "environmental influ- ence" has only "see intelligence" next to it; that "teacher-pupil interactions" is listed, but "mother-child interaction" is not. Nonetheless, we must be happy with what we have rather than caviling about what is absent. This book, and the companion volumes, are readable, informative, and extremely useful even if incomplete. Catherine E. Snow Harvard Graduate School of Education Children reading and writing: Structures and strategies. Judith A. Langer. Nor- wood, NJ: Ablex, 1986. Pp. viii + 193. Judith Langer's Children reading and writing is by her own statement an attempt to document the differences between reading and writing in terms of the use of language skills involved. Although the author provides evidence that reading and writing tap similar underlying processes, she is primarily concerned with dis- abusing educators who glibly lump the two together as "related language ac- tivities" and proceed to instruct accordingly. Langer studied sixty-seven 8-, 11-, and 14-year-old children who were in the 80th percentile nationally in both reading and language. In her choice of this population, Langer was more concerned with children's capability than with their normal performance. She interviewed the children, their parents, and their teachers. Each child wrote one story and one report and read and retold one story and one report. Self-report measures were gathered either during ("think- aloud") or after ("retrospective") the activities of reading and writing. After the self-report, probing and text-based questions were asked of them. In analyzing the interviews, Langer found not too much that is surprising, except perhaps that teachers focus more on the meaning involved in both reading and writing, whereas children focus more on the skills needed (vocabulary, spelling, etc.). One might have expected it to be the other way around. Langer found that by age 8, children clearly distinguished story from report genres, and she proceeds to establish how such different uses shape emerging text. Children frequently used sequence to organize stories overall, both when composing and when retelling these stories, but rarely did so for reports. Titles or main ideas generally organize most reports, whether composed or retold. Chil- dren used syntactically more complex sentences (orT-units, after Hunt, 1965) in reports as compared to stories. However, in terms of the relationship between sentences (or T-units), the situation must be viewed developmentally. At ages 8 and 11, there is more elaborate structure in stories than reports; at age 14, this reverses. Children elaborated their ideas in a number of ways, depending largely on the genre. Sequences and, to a lesser extent, responses (dialogue) were used more in