This paper suggests that the main reason for the failure of many children to learn to read may be that reading programs often require the child to begin reading before he has developed oral language skills. By 3 years of age the child has acquired almost all the linguistic rules needed to produce basic, or kernel, sentences, which consist of subject, auxiliary, and predicate. Language programs for young children should work with the two major aspects of linguistic activity: competence (internalized knowledge, or rules of grammar), and performance (the use the child makes of that knowledge when speaking.) Transformational grammar may be used as a tool to expand the child's language; this is discussed in terms of Jacobs' (1968) writing on deep structure and surface structure. A first principle of language teachers is to listen to and respect the language the deprived child brings with him to the classroom, then extend his ability to communicate by addition of a new social dialect. Teachers must know how to assess the child's linguistic skills, identifying areas of competence and performance, so that individualized instruction may be planned. Classes should stress student involvement and utilization of the child's own sentence patterns, as a means for the teacher to direct the child's own discovery of transformations of more complex speech patterns. (Author/NH)