9.2. Reading as interpretation of information

9.2.1. Surface and deep structures

Reading is an aspect of language, only superficially different from the comprehension of speech. Many of the skills employed by a child in learning the regularities of spoken language may also be employed to learn reading.

We can consider the two cases of oral speech and writing if we regard words, spoken or written, as the surface representation of a message, and the meaning as something deeper. Many linguists and psychologists recently have had a good deal to say about the relation between the surface and deep levels of the language. The surface level refers to the physical manifestation of language as it impinges on the ear or eye, and the deep level refers to meaning or semantic interpretation. There is no simple correspondence between the surface structure of language and meaning. This fact is critical for any understanding of language and of reading.

Deep structure	Surface structure
room machine slot tray grapes	When you’re hungry and are in the room where there’s a machine to sell vacuum packed food, take some small change out of your pocket and insert the coins into the slot, press the button next to the name of the thing you want and have paid for, grapes, for instance, and in a little while it’ll appear on a tray. Take the package, open it and help yourself to the grapes.

Reading is not a matter of going from words to meaning, but rather from meaning to words. To read words effectively, you need to have a good idea in advance of what it is that you are reading. This is not as paradoxical as it might seem. The meaning of a sentence is not the sum total of the meaning of the individual words of that sentence.

9.2.2. Grammar

It would seem that in order to understand a meaning of spoken/written sentences we need to know much more than the meaning of the words of which they are constructed. There must be certain rules that the speaker/writer uses to produce sentences and that the receiver uses to comprehend sentences. These rules, known to both the transmitter and the receiver, are vital sources of information for the communication process that is language. There is no information in the words that comprise a sentence unless we also have the information about the way they are put together.

Thus, ‘Eats fish man the the’ are the words of the sentence in alphabetical order. In this sequence, they mean nothing. But the words also mean nothing in the sentence ‘The man eats the fish’ unless we also know the rules by which the words are put together. You know how difficult it is to read anything in a foreign language if you have not really mastered the grammar. ‘Grammar’ is the key word. Whatever the meaning of a particular piece of language may be – whatever the deep level interpretation of a statement – it is related to the surface physical representation – the sound or the sight of the statement – by the rules of grammar.

For the speaker/writer the rules of grammar are not just the rules that he applies to organise his statements. They are the rules he implicitly assumes the receiver knows in order to be able to extract the meaning from the statements. For the reader/listener, grammar is the key to comprehending language.