Book excerpt: This volume presents the results of a two-year research project which examined the development and use of reading and writing by school-aged children. The studies examined the relationships between children's reading and writing by looking at the social contexts that surrounded their understandings and uses of reading and writing; the cognitive processes that the readers and writers invoked in completing different kinds of tasks; and the products that were produced, including the ideas that were developed in reading and writing, and the ways in which these ideas were structured in presentation or recall. The results point to new understandings about children's context for literacy, and ways in which children at distinctly different phases of their schooling experiences approach reading and writing. The author contrasts ways in which children at each of the differing ages approach their reading and writing tasks, illuminating the knowledge they already have and what they have yet to learn.