Transformations and Comprehension.

TJOR children to comprehend "*" what they read, they must be able to understand the written language structures by which ideas, information and concepts are conveyed. Although children may be fluent in their use of oral language and may have acquired control over the basic sentence patterns of the English language by the time they enter school, it does not follow that this fluency will automatically transfer to writ ten language structures. Further more, although a child may have acquired the basic patterns of the language by the time he enters school, it must be remembered that the task of manipulating more and more complex structures still lies before him. Throughout the years, writers have suggested various linguistic factors which they claim tend to increase the complexity of written language. Vocabulary or number of hard words and sentence length appeared to be the two factors which were rated most often by experimenters as causing greatest difficulty in reading. Within the last decade or so a new theory of language has been formulated by Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This is the theory of transformational-generative gram mar which holds that every sen tence can be represented on two levels?a surface structure level and a deep structure level. The surface structure level is the form of the language to which the learner is exposed?its spoken or