In viewing the approach to English and other grammars in the light of linguistic universals, the author feels that the principal justification for deep structure analysis of English is that "deep structure analyses of all the languages of our multilingual world in combination can serve as a genuinely scientific basis of a defensible universal grammar." At the present time, however, teachers of English as a second language should teach "an intelligent updated traditional surface structure grammar at all levels below the graduate and even at graduate levels." Surface structure differences, which may be considered "peripheral" in considering languages in general, are nevertheless "considerable." (Given is an example of contrasts between an English and Spanish question pattern.) After having taught the Jacobs and Rosenbaum "English Transformational Grammar" in a graduate course in grammatical theory and analysis, the author contends that the terminology and format of deep structure English grammar are "unnecessarily troublesome" at present. If the purpose of English teachers is to teach the English actually spoken and written, they must teach surface structure English. The author questions and discusses the desirability of thinking in terms of transformations at all. (AMM)