Aspects of the discourse of 5 language-impaired children and 5 children with no language impairment, aged approximately 9 years, were compared. A film and a story sequence were utilised to elicit narratives on which, measures of cohesion, tense and pronouns were appraised. Measures of cohesion refer to the ability to indicate appropriately the relations of meaning with regard to situational context. Measures of tense include aspects of tense range and tense continuity. Measures of pronouns refer to the anaphoric use of pronouns with non-ambiguous referents. The group of language-impaired children was found to be significantly poorer on measures of cohesion and pronominal usage than the normal children, whereas a significant difference between the two groups was not revealed on measures of tense. Possible factors accounting for these findings were discussed and implications for the diagnosis and therapy of the older language-impaired child were considered.